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Showing G-d no respect, but still turning up to shul
From aborted landings to Yom Kippur services, faith has a funny habit of resurfacing when life gets uncomfortable
With apologies for almost quoting Jesus in such a context, but last week it struck me that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven. The thought occurred on an aeroplane as the landing was aborted at the final moment and there was a universal clenching of sphincters. My relationship with a higher power generally comes to the fore at such moments of stress. They say there are no atheists in foxholes and there can’t be too many when turbulence hits at 35,000 feet.
At school, I came up with a line that summed up my uncertain feelings about any potential deity: “Showing G-d no respect.” That carefully placed hyphen undercut the rebellious punk spirit of the statement, like a child on Halloween wearing a thick jacket over a Superman costume. I am defined by a heady combination of rationality and superstition, oxymoronic, with the emphasis firmly placed on the moronic.
My maternal grandfather was brought up in an orthodox Polish family, but Auschwitz changed him, as it is wont to do. By the end of his life, he was a keen connoisseur of pork and seafood but refused to rule out the possibility that there might be a God, explaining, “At my age, you can never be too careful.” He was a twice-a-year synagogue man and believed morality trumped religious observance. On those grounds, he would doubtless have been welcomed into the VIP section of heaven and greeted with a glass of champagne.
September signals a return to school for the children and two shul appearances for the agnostics amongst us who like to keep their eye in. Middlesex, the most well-supported cricket team amongst Jews in the country, inevitably has its biggest game in a decade on Kol Nidre, the holiest eve of the year. I’ve heard if you want to make God laugh, then tell him your plans, but must he also insist on pointing in our faces and screaming “Aaaah”?
My father attends synagogue dutifully but largely out of habit and never expects to get much out of the experience. In these ways, he is much like a Spurs season ticket holder, and he has a similar feeling that this is somehow the right thing to do, however arduous it might feel. I sense, as with many others, he goes to shul not to be with God but to be with Jews (something also true of those at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium). My dad’s sense of fun far outweighs any piety, and thus services in our youth and beyond have tended to pass quicker as a result of countless invented games, the best of which involves attempting to guess the publication year of a prayer book by touch alone. It’s fun for all the family on Yom Kippur, and it undoubtedly beats atoning for your sins.
Life often reads like the Book of Job, a series of unfortunate events that come across as arbitrary and cruel. Not only does peace in the Middle East seem like a pipe dream, but you also make a cup of tea only to discover the fridge contains no milk. It is little wonder we as humans adopt coping mechanisms for that over which we have no control. We used to open a Terry’s Chocolate Orange in our house depending on the state of play in Manchester United games, although, after two decades of success with the tactic, it weirdly seemed to stop working at the exact point Sir Alex Ferguson retired.
It is hard not to feel like Larry in A Serious Man, the Coen brothers’ peerless adaptation of the Job story, when he asks a rabbi, of Hashem, “Why does he make us feel the questions if he’s not going to give us any answers?”
This was a summer that seemed endless, but the rain has finally arrived and, with it, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Everything feels as though it will never end until the precise moment it does. Summer, winter, heartache, hunger, thirst, failure, success, life, Wordle streaks and even synagogue services eventually draw to a close. Until then, cling onto whatever life raft you can to get through, and if you catch us rigorously examining a siddur in shul without actually reading the thing, then remember we are doing the Lord’s work and having fun.
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