whose hands are these?

Jews don't bow.

That's what they taught us in Hebrew School.

Jews don't bow, idol-worshippers do.

Jews don't bow, like Uncle Mordechai in the Purim story, who didn't bow to King Ahashverosh, and boy did that make Haman's (ptu! ptu!) blood boil.

And so a year ago and change, at the local Zen Center, as I bowed all the way to the ground, forehead gingerly touching, I asked myself:

Are these my hands?

Whose hands are these?

Disembodied. That's how I felt, surreptitious sidelong glances to the person next to me to see if I'm doing it right, knees folded beneath my belly, bare toes reaching behind me.

I looked at my hands.

Following the crowd, I lifted my palms a few inches and then brought them down again, stood up and held those palms together in front of my chest.

Is this me?

After all, I was on a quest to find myself.

Ramadan 2005, not long after: I'm wearing a scarf to cover my oh-so-lascivious hair, I'm huddling next to a new friend, eager to tell me about the life of a midwestern WASP-bred convert to Islam, a woman who doesn't understand the prayers but says that in Islam she found the answers to all the existential questions that'd plagued her since childhood: she even tried Mormonism, she told me, in a half-whisper in the back room of the mosque.

I bowed next to her in the women's section, feet bare again, anxiously fixing my head-scarf lest any wisps of hair show, down and then up again, head on the rug, listening to the microtonal Allahu Akbar, the rustling of the assembled descending to the carpet.

More sidelong glances: how long do I stay here?

And as my gaze falls across my hands:

Whose hands are these?

Are these my hands?

And still my quest continued.



Yom Kippur 2006, assembled amongst the young, hip, overeducated faithful, an airy huge room with dim light filtering through white curtains, breezy and calm like a lozenge:

Jews do bow.

Only on the High Holidays, only during the Aleinu prayer, the one that says thank you for not making us like those godforsaken heathens, the one that says And We Bend The Knee And Bow, and usually we half-heartedly crouch and lean forward a bit, looking side-to-side to make sure we're not down any longer than our neighbor.

But on this day, Jews do bow, only it was just the old men who had no shame who did it in my synagogue growing up, nobody else would do something so _religious_ as to actually prostrate themselves in a public location.

What if their makeup smeared?

But the people in this shul, this year, are too overeducated to wear makeup, and it's kind of hip to be frum, and the rabbi has charisma and the people actually listen to her, dammit, and so we bow.

Everyone bows, pushing back their folding chairs a bit, it's quiet, and there's that whooshing sound of 500 people awkwardly lowering themselves to the ground, and we stay there a good moment, and my forehead touches the ground, my knees tucked under my belly, my feet enclosed in shoes sticking out behind me, and I lift my palms a few inches because I feel like moving something and I remember how to do it, and I see my hands, and I think:

These are my hands.

And no, I'm not going to say that they're Jewish hands, and in the mosque and the zen center I was trying to be someone I'm not,

But I can't escape it, it seems.

I'm more Jewish than matzah ball soup, more Jewish than Woody Allen, more Jewish than Chinese food on Christmas and voting for the Democratic candidate and feeling guilty and being neurotic and hoarding university degrees like tomorrow they're going to disappear.

And so these are my hands, attached to the ends of my arms, bending the knee and bowing amongst the overeducated, and these are my hands, that have traveled to a mosque and a zen center and returned to a shul -

And These Are My Hands, I think, prostrating, a new year, in the bosom of the community, and I know what I want to say and I'm going to learn how to say it, and Thank You -

And Thank You - I say, because I've found a home of sorts - and I am nothing - and I come to You whole, nothing more and nothing less than myself - and I'm not going to run any longer because these hands are tied to this mind,

And I had to leave, to prostrate in a place where I felt foreign, so I could come home and do the uncomfortable act that I could only have learned elsewhere, and feel no shame because I'm not running any longer:

These are my hands.

sanity and other tenuous concepts

This is supposed to be about everyday life. The mundane and how it becomes holy and symbolic and metaphoric. And sometimes there are days and there are experiences that defy such categories, and sometimes reality shifts and loses focus and distorts and who is the sane one and who is the insane?

And tonight I watched my worst fears come true: I watched a friend lose control, laughing until what seemed like sobs began, laughing at what, I'm not sure, lost in an internal, self-contained world, laughing at personal not-funny jokes, at the sound of her own voice, 6-year-old jokes, and reality bent a little, shifted a bit off-center, the colors became iridescent and the planes of existence warped just a bit; the center dropped out and there was only the margins;

tonight I watched a friend lose control and I reverted to my oldest coping mechanism: I checked out. Dissociated. Picked at my tiramisu, walked out of the room and made my bed, considered taking a walk;

and then she was back and she was asking me how I felt and if I thought she was crazy and what the hell was I supposed to say? Oh my god, I've only ever seen people do this in movies. You mean people actually behave like this? What were you thinking, I wanted to ask her, what was going through your mind when you were acting like that? But is that really a question she can answer? I knew what was going through her mind; it was exactly what she was saying; and it wasn't communication, exactly, not entertainment, exactly, self-entertainment, maybe. Maybe.

and when the colors returned to those of the rainbow, the axes returned to right angles, the vertigo subsided, what in this great universe do I say? are you okay?

is insanity the only sane response to an insane world? why did that scare me so? would it have scared you?

in praise of teachers

I've been spending a lot of time around teachers lately, being that I'm training to be one, for unclear reasons.

I wasn't sure what to make of them at first, these matronly, stocky, middle-aged women named Bonnie and Bettie, full-bosomed, with perfectly coiffed hair and sensible glasses. Teachers have seemed like depleted people to me, people who'd surely abandoned passion for comfort, who'd silenced themselves for a pension, who awoke with the dawn, were flawlessly punctual and always prepared, who used words like oaktag and goldenrod like nothing.

These are strong women.

These are women who love. They are women with such wisdom, who dispense it without a second thought: Christopher, asked calmly, do you think what you just said to Alison was appropriate? (With the slightest bit of a smirk, but really a smile that says I am not angry at you, I simply want you to learn to live with each other.)

These are not the teachers who desire to control or silence or whip into shape. These are learned matriarchs, with an enduring love for children and an pure desire to see them learn and grow; they are not pushovers or sellouts but people who spend their mornings instructing little human beings in how to be people; how to respect themselves and each other and how to be continuously excited about every new thing in the world. Who listen with the greatest respect and kindness to every "my mom took me to the library yesterday and we got a book and it was about..." and every tummyache and every "he pushed me" and who can contain it not out of any bit of self-denial, but out of an abundance of love.

These were the women who taught me. I can never quite be these women, but I can learn from their stolid presence, their humor and their strength. May they go from strength to strength.