I was caught up in a hora once at a wedding. It was not something I volunteered to do. I would have rather sat alone at the table and finished my dessert while everyone else danced in a frenzy to “Hava Nagila”. But I was coerced into joining. This hora was not the hora I’ve seen Hasidim dancing; marching and stomping rhythmically and uniformly in a circle. Hasidim dancing seems almost mystical to me. I can imagine them holding hands, or their hands on each other’s shoulder, dancing in trees, on clouds, or on water; but only as art, don’t try this at home.
Our family attended an orthodox shul in the Bronx that you could clearly see from a back window of our apartment. My mother would hang laundry on a clothesline that extended from that window, across an alley, to a telephone pole on Minford place where the shul stood. One Yom Kippur, when I was about ten or eleven, it dawned on me that I didn’t have shoes to wear that day to shul. All I owned were what I was wearing: sneakers. My father said it would be okay to wear them, but I wasn’t going to embarrass myself wearing a beat-up pair of sneakers while other families would be wearing their finest holiday attire. Then my father pointed out that some people congregating at the shul’s entrance were indeed wearing sneakers. I couldn’t believe it, but I could see from our window that they were. He explained to me that some religious Jews will not wear leather footwear to shul on Yom Kippur or Tisha B’Av. What a nice surprise. I didn’t have shoes, and shoes were not required. How lucky was I.
A man trying to blow a Ram’s horn that’s still attached to a Ram? I admit it’s silly. But I had to see what it looked like on paper. The bottle of wine was an after-thought that gave some reason that he would even attempt this feat, though my preference was not to have a pious Jew seem drunk, maybe just tipsy. Giving it the title “Shofar Shogood” sounded to me like someone speaking who’d been drinking. It seemed to work too. But let’s be honest, not even a meshuggeneh would attempt to do this . . . maybe just dream the whole nutty thing up?
I was caught up in a hora once at a wedding. It was not something I volunteered to do. I would have rather sat alone at the table and finished my dessert while everyone else danced in a frenzy to “Hava Nagila”. But I was coerced into joining. This hora was not the hora I’ve seen Hasidim dancing; marching and stomping rhythmically and uniformly in a circle. Hasidim dancing seems almost mystical to me. I can imagine them holding hands, or their hands on each other’s shoulder, dancing in trees, on clouds, or on water; but only as art, don’t try this at home.
Our family attended an orthodox shul in the Bronx that you could clearly see from a back window of our apartment. My mother would hang laundry on a clothesline that extended from that window, across an alley, to a telephone pole on Minford place where the shul stood. One Yom Kippur, when I was about ten or eleven, it dawned on me that I didn’t have shoes to wear that day to shul. All I owned were what I was wearing: sneakers. My father said it would be okay to wear them, but I wasn’t going to embarrass myself wearing a beat-up pair of sneakers while other families would be wearing their finest holiday attire. Then my father pointed out that some people congregating at the shul’s entrance were indeed wearing sneakers. I couldn’t believe it, but I could see from our window that they were. He explained to me that some religious Jews will not wear leather footwear to shul on Yom Kippur or Tisha B’Av. What a nice surprise. I didn’t have shoes, and shoes were not required. How lucky was I.
A man trying to blow a Ram’s horn that’s still attached to a Ram? I admit it’s silly. But I had to see what it looked like on paper. The bottle of wine was an after-thought that gave some reason that he would even attempt this feat, though my preference was not to have a pious Jew seem drunk, maybe just tipsy. Giving it the title “Shofar Shogood” sounded to me like someone speaking who’d been drinking. It seemed to work too. But let’s be honest, not even a meshuggeneh would attempt to do this . . . maybe just dream the whole nutty thing up?