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This year, I prayed not to be inscribed in the Book of Life.

There is no careful way to say that I am tired – as a Jew, as a woman – of surviving.

American Judaism has lost its soul, and I feel like I’m floating through the forgotten memory of an inheritance we stopped remembering. On Yom Kippur, when the congregation rose, I remained talui – suspended, awaiting judgment – trying to determine from within Jewish tradition whether pikuach nefesh has reached my limit. Is asking not to be inscribed in the Book of Life against the very machinery of Jewish survival?

The rabbis held questions open precisely so we could wrestle toward an answer, so here’s my question: why, dammit, does Judaism offer no escape without first demanding an argument?

What follows is my case file for the suspended judgment. I hope you’ll stay with me because a question held open needs witnesses: I am asking you to sit with me while I argue whether a Jew refusing to petition the Book of Life – for a year, this year, in a year like this one – is a betrayal of the tradition or the most Jewish prayer I’ve ever held.

Who am I? I want to untangle the memories that make up a consciousness, because I do not believe the end will make it all worthwhile by soothing a reader’s reaction to life’s intensity. I am curious about my own consciousness, which is one reason I write. The other is that I am determined, desperately, to bear witness to my own Jewish soul.

Why keep reading? I hope you’ll stay with me because I am … to an extent … like Hannah Arendt: in love with a Nazi, that Jewish woman penned a book about the brain behind the gas chambers so offensive to her Jewish community it wasn’t translated into Hebrew for four decades. Yes, I am Hannah Arendt – a woman inside Jewish consciousness and outside Jewish communal limitations. Like her, I will spend a lifetime making theory to make meaning of my own soul.

Together we are Jacob: wrestling with an angel through the night and by daybreak transformed into Israel – rewarded not for the ultimatum of victory or obedience, but for the act of struggle itself. For “you have striven with God and with man.”

I am guided by Esther Ha’Malkah (The “Queen”). Esther’s book, Megillat Esther, is the only Biblical story in which two things are both true: the woman prevails as the heroine of her own story, and God’s name is not mentioned. On Purim, as Jews recite a story of these characters – Vashti, Achashverosh, Haman, and Mordechai – we, the Jewish people, do not (as typical) thank God for mercy, but Esther for her courage.

For the last half decade, Esther has ignited a light of curiosity and purpose in me strong enough to compel me to survive. In Esther, we celebrate a Tzadik(a) – a righteous one – who rescued her people not by physical might, but by taking up space as a woman (uninvited) and by opening her mouth to speak (uninvited) as a Jew.

Esther helps me hang on; through her, life becomes a choice. To make meaning out of the totality of moments. To mark life by the totality of the choices.

Individually and collectively, this Yom Kippur I say: we have endured, and so what?

In the words of Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz,

“The theme that circles … the continuous thread … is, of course, power. Power between women and men and the need to disrupt the imbalance; power as the partial result of violence-as-tool; power as the mark of the Jew, the too-powerful, scapegoated for all power imbalance. And the result: the woman, the Jew … taught, on every level imaginable, to fear her own power. What happens when she begins to contact her power? What happens when we begin to contact our collective power?

“The theme that circles … the continuous thread … is, of course, power. Power between women and men and the need to disrupt the imbalance; power as the partial result of violence-as-tool; power as the mark of the Jew, the too-powerful, scapegoated for all power imbalance. And the result: the woman, the Jew … taught, on every level imaginable, to fear her own power. What happens when she begins to contact her power? What happens when we begin to contact our collective power?

Is struggle a calling, a........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)