Bicycle Day

When I was a kid growing up in Israel we used to call Yom Kipur (aka the Day of Atonement) Bicycle Day, because there were no cars in the street. Nobody drove. Not that it's a greater sin on the High Holy Days than any regular Sabbath, just a local tradition. One year, I must have been about 8, I cycled all the way to a village the other side of town with my younger cousin riding on the cross bar of my blue Raleigh that we had brought over on a plane from England. We took picnic supplies with us (of course, all the stores were closed) and my parents probably had no idea where we were because there were no cellphones in those days and nobody worried. Only kids were on the streets, the parents were all busy praying or fasting, or privately not doing those things. The traffic lights were still on, even the one my mother had organized a demonstration about before it was finally erected to prevent further traffic accidents on the main road. At first, we played at following the lights, then we just ignored them.

This year, I went to synagogue and my soul was suitably tormented by a lecture on the cultural anthropology of mourning that included the phrase 'macro-feedback-loop'. I did not ask for that, nor did I ask for the phrase 'revives the dead' to be replaced by 'gives life to everything'. I have no need for a God that gives life to everything. Lightning in a pond, some organic chemistry and evolution will suffice. Raises the fallen, heals the sick, frees prisoners and... 'gives life to everything'? It is a non-sequiter. I want a God that makes miracles, thank you. I want something that binds me to my spiritual identity and inspires me. Not 'consoling the bereaved' as a duty whose worth cannot be measured, although I'm sure I could do more of it and that would be a good thing. Not when it is a mistranslation of 'accompanying the dead'. Never mind that I'm an atheist.

Maybe you have to be in the right mood. The best ever Yom Kipur drash I heard was by a woman rabbi in London, when my father was in a coma in hospital a few weeks before he died. She quoted Kant, sadly I have forgotten the context but it caught my attention because unlike Spinoza he never was one of us. She mentioned the dwindling numbers of Jews in Britain, and how a survey in the US had shown that short of thrice weekly religious school the best predictor of kids staying Jewish was keeping some sort of kosher at home. She said people laughed at her keeping kosher when she came over to the US for rabinnical school, but now she felt vindicated. Ever since then we've only eaten ham sandwiches outside the home.

Earlier in the day I played at the swing. It was gorgeously clear over the bay and the view of the Golden Gate Bridge was amazing. For the first time, I stood up on the swing and noticed all the other amusements. Someone must have hung a new trapeze and Tarzan rope on a nearby tree a little further downhill, and there was what appeared to be a yellow tightrope between two trees higher up, but loose and with knots in it. Next time, I'm bringing bicycle gloves.