Rosh Hashanah

Amy and I have been talking about redemption. About the possibility. And the necessity. Mostly about the first moment in fall when your breath, as I said to her, puffs out in wafts. That moment, she replied, it's like the simplest reminder of the simplest fact: we are alive. We are breathing in and out this air and we can see it.

It started because I realized as I was pulling on my long-sleeved blouse that it smelled of last winter. It smelled of settling in the curve of someone's side and huddling under blankets. I have not worn it since, with the summer's heat, and I must not have washed it.

Today, she told me, begins Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. It is one filled with contemplation and repentance. And prayer. And psalms, which I love, because they are a textual sacrifice and an attempt to praise the infinite with words. "I offer in his tabernacle sacrifices of joy; I will sing, yeah, I will sing praises unto the Lord."

Amy told me that last Saturday at midnight Ashkenazi Jews began reciting Selichot, or Shelosh-'Esreh Middot, poems seeking the thirteen attributes of mercy listed in Exodus 34. Selichot, prayers as she explained them. Key words being: forgiveness, chorus, binding, we have sinned, and petition. Key words being: compassion, mercy, grace, patience, truth, mercy, pardoning. Seeking, beseeching mercy. Forgiveness for: iniquity, transgression, sin. Key words always, insistently: forgive me, forgive me forgive me. It seems appropriate, she continued, to designate full days, weeks, months of awe—both for the things we lose, and the things we redeem. For the compassion, mercy, grace, and truth in the Lord’s infinite mercy.

And the fall is the perfect time for this, I told her. A time of forgiveness and mercy, just what I ought to feel as the sun is saying I've stayed too long already and blushing behind trees earlier in the evening. And things are getting older. Maybe that's why I'm so anxiously waiting for the cold to come and for the humidity to leave. I am craving the assurance of cardigans and warm soups. There is something comforting in the pain of frosted ears warming again. Probably about the thawing of mercy, of redemption from hurt and bleakness that sometimes doesn't seem appropriate in summer.

It seems all too appropriate, she said, to remember with longing those of our past in this week of remembrance and prayer. The many small misdoings we did to each other, the many tender acts we shared together. Even the scent of them lingering in the hems of things.