A CLARION CALL

While saying good-bye to a friend in front of Key Food on Seventh Avenue, an Orthodox Jewish man (perhaps a Chassid) accosted us and asked if we were Jewish (I am, my friend was not) and if we'd yet heard the sound of the Shofar in this High Holiday season.

He was dressed in the usual black suit and hat and white shirt, and he was carrying a small black shofar, the ram's horn that is a traditional part of the High Holidays ceremonies in the Jewish faith. I cannot say how old he was--pale and thin, in this "traditional" garb, he could have been anywhere from early 20s to late 50s, although I do suspect he was younger than I. He looked zealously eager to perform this task, sounding the horn for strangers who somehow had managed to stray from the synagogue during the holiest of holidays.

My friend, Sue, seemed a bit startled and, having had a rough weekend, eager to flee. I, on the other hand, though usually prone to ignoring strangers who accost me and with the perfect excuse of needing to get groceries at Key Food, could well have avoided this man, but chose not to run. Something made me respond and identify my ethnic origin, as well as that of my friend. And when he asked if I'd like to hear the sound of the Shofar, I hesitated a moment but then said "yes." (Sue offered to then leave us, but I encouraged her to stay, knowing she'd never experienced such a thing, and, good attractive Irish lass that she is, she'd never be accosted on her own.)

I didn't know for sure which blessings would be required before his sounding the horn, but once he started each, I picked up and surprised him (and myself a bit) by knowing them and being able to recite them without too much coaching. (The blessings all start out similarly, but take various diversions to bless the item in question, given the particular holiday. Then, there is the "shehechianu," which I've no doubt misspelled but is the blessing for the first time you do a particular act on a given holiday.)

The words came out of me almost spontaneously--while my sister is quite religious, keeps Kosher, and is a leader in her Jewish community, I have eschewed organized religion for more personalized worship. Without going into it too deeply, I am into a spiritual one-on-one versus the trappings of money, rules and judgment that I find seep their way into any organized religion. I'm not against it--one needs spirituality, and the individual should find it wherever they can--but while I find the rituals and culture of Judaism quite beautiful, I find that a harsh, judgmental air does not make me, a gay man, at one with the Community. So I practice alone. For Rosh Hashanah, for example, I meditated and wrote my thoughts out in an extra-long journal entry. I am a writer by nature and by definition, such that I feel I best commune with my concept of God and the Universe through my words, the gifts that I was given. It is, in a sense, my own form of daily worship ("workship", to coin a phrase).

But if I'm to be honest, I've hit a dry patch financially and professionally, which has been a cause for concern. Depression and a loss of personal identity have ensued, and while I'm moving forward as best I can, I often have felt sad of late, as if something was slipping by me, some secret on everyone else's lips that I can't quite hear and I'm left asking them to repeat the secret--but of course, they don't. I'm old enough both to be scared by this feeling and also old enough (I hope) to know that life is cyclical and that if I wait long enough, things will get better again.

Once the blessings were said, the youngish old man (or oldish young man) raised the small black ram's horn to his lips. I'd seen far more resplendent horns in affluent congregations, and had no idea if the size and splendor of the horn's appearance had an effect on its sound production. I still don't know. My trumpeter's breath control was not that of a widely-practiced horn player, and the long "t'kiah," followed by quick, short staccato blasts, were not as crisp or accurate as I have known in the past. The Shofar is a piercing call to worship--or to arms, in centuries past. It is a sound that should lack hesitation, defiantly pouring out the history of countless generations. This seemed a bit pale, fragile, uncertain.

And yet. As troubled as I've felt these past weeks, as much as I was happy not to have sat in a synagogue as a hypocrite disliking the very practices I'd be participating in, as independent to believe as I choose . . . there was something about the moment, there on the corner of 7th Avenue, in front of the grocery store, a thin young/old man blowing his modest black ram's horn . . . it made me feel better somehow. Safer. Like the world was still crazy but, having come home to the sound, I would be alright. There was no chiding, no telling me I had to return to the fold. Just a notice that I still belonged, if I chose. And I suppose, to be honest, that I was grateful.

I thanked the stranger and wished him l'shana tovah. I then kissed my departing friend, and went on with the business of purchasing the goods for dinner, somehow set back on track.


BOOB TUBE REVIEW
Brothers & Sisters (Sundays, 10pm, ABC) - With the classiest of pedigrees, this show has been given a prime spot just behind the juggernaut Desperate Housewives (which admittedly had an opener far improved over last year's pallid mismosh). With the return to series television of such talents as Sally Field, Calista Flockhart and Rachel Griffiths, plus a host of attractive but rather too similar young men (Tom Skerritt and Ron Rifkin aside), this was to be a major event, especially given the stewardship of Ken Olin (Thirtysomething) and playwright Jon Robin Baitz. So why did it feel so . . . flat? Like all these talented, attractive people had gotten together to create and discovered they had nothing real to say to each other? The cast is indeed arresting, and the promised clash of conservative and liberal views in a family is still to come in more detail (one hopes), but the mismanagement of funds in a family business (here, a food company) and the sudden death of a prominent family member made this feel more like a nighttime soap than a new step forward in arresting television drama. Surely, Grey's Anatomy, its predecessor in the time slot, had made me feel both more entertained and more intellectually stimulated than this. With the powerhouse team assembled, more is promised, but it remains to be seen if that promise will be delivered.