2.10.1987

REFLECTIONS ON PAST YOM KIPPURS


These are some of the unexpected or expected things that happen on or about Yom Kippur in recent memory. Memory being as short as it is nowadays, this chronicle deliberately begins a year after the only Yom Kippur that is remembered by those who happened to be here in that year - 1973.

After all, while theoretically all religious people are more or less doing the same thing - fasting and praying, with maybe a short nap somewhere along the line - even among the religious there are subtle differences that mean a world of difference to those who know the differences.

There are, for example, religious Jews who do not include in their liturgies of atonement and mourning, prayers for soldiers who died in battle or even the Yom Kippur War.

And, of course, there are many Israelis for whom Yom Kippur is a day of videos, or bicycle-riding or simply playing with the kids. For some, the traditions of Yom Kippur include a good round of stone-throwing, and for others a round of poker is preferred.

The year 1974 was a bad one for traffic accidents, so bad apparently that the chief rabbis of the day declared that for 40 days, up to Yom Kippur, a mention of road safety be included in prayers. Whether the prayers helped is buried in the files of the Central Bureau of Statistics. What is known is that on Yom Kippur in 1974, 29 babies were born in Shaare Zedek Hospital in Jerusalem, setting a record for the most births in one day in any hospital in Israel.

In 1977 there were no carrots to be found in the shuk and pomegranates cost IL 8. A few weeks later the late Simha Ehrlich followed Menachem Begin's command and made things goods for the people-prices in Israel would never be the same. Nowadays, by the way, that IL 8 worth of pomegranates would be equivalent to 50 agorot.

A year later, Moshe Dayan was in Washington seeing the president, Jimmy Carter. Newspapers speculated that the White House appointment would not leave Dayan enough time to get to a Georgetown synagogue. It was never reported whether the usually dionysian Dayan made it to the synagogue, probably because he didn't, but in those days begin brooked no insult for his religious coalition partners.

Religion, of course, may sometimes have nothing to do with Yom Kippur, just as politics usually has nothing to do with religion. In 1985, for example, a 22 year-old Gazan stabbed a 16-year-old Gazan, because the latter insisted on smoking in public at the restaurant where they both worked in the Strip. The 22-year-old had argued that the smoking offended the Jewish patrons of the restaurant on the Day of Atonement.

In Tel-Aviv, as was reported in this newspaper last year, thousands of people are out on bicycles, roaming the streets-it's the only day when there is no traffic. Ostensible there shouldn't be any traffic fatalities on Yom Kippur. But in 1982, a four-year-old girl was killed while playing under the Geha bridge that crosses Derech Jabotinksky, which is the main route from Tel-Aviv to the mother of the moshavot, Petah Tikva.

In 1985 a chain of international dramas began on Yom Kippur, with the murders of three Israelis on board their yacht in Larnaca. Those killings led to Israel's air raid over Tunisia, which led to the Achille Lauro hijacking, and so on and so forth until, as Yitzhak Shamir recently said, "even after there's peace."

In 1984, Jews recited Kol Nidre in the main exhibition hall of the Frankfurt Book Fair, while in Israel it was unusually hot. In 1986 the weather was actually quite hot when settlers and soldiers clashed near Joseph's Tomb. In 1983, while all of Bnei Brak's was hungry in penitence, someone stole half a million dollars in cash and jewelry from the Viszhnitz Hotel, Bnei Brak's most important residence for visiting dignitaries Police investigators examining evidence said it appeared to be an inside job.

So this Yom Kippur is likely to be no different. People will faint tomorrow afternoon; ambulances will probably be stoned by kids at the Hadera intersection, and some of us, religious and non-religious might even do the soul-searching called in Hebrew "the arithmetic of the soul".

A.D.Gordon, who like many of the Second Aliya, started life in a religious home and ended up in that religion called secularism, once gave thought to the problem. Writing about Yom Kippur, he asked "Have we," meaning secular Jews, "closed our account with Judaism? Have we clarified to ourselves what religion means to the human soul? Above all, what Judaism, the creation of our national spirit means to the soul of the Jew?" And he continued in the never-completed essay called "On Yom Kippur": "What obscures the issue is that we see the external side of religion, while ignoring its main side, the inner side."

The "we" in that essay originally referred to those who, like Gordon, gave up the religion of their forefathers for a new religion on Jewish labour in a Jewish land. Nowadays, all too often, it appears that it could apply to all of us, religious and not, those who fast and those who ride bikes.

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