Yom Kippur Sheini

For most Jews, Yom Kippur ends with a giant surge of joy. Many Jews wear their kittles, their shrouds during the entire holiday. all through the holiday we pray for our very lives. At the very end of the last service, we recite the verses that are recited for us, with us, as we take our last breaths and then we all realize collectively, as Monty Python put it...We are not dead yet. That rush, the joy of being alive carries us through the next several days.

But I remember every year dear friends for whom this day is not a day of joy but a day of great pain and sadness.

I have two very dear to me sets of friends who each suffered a profound loss on the day after Yom Kippur.

The death that took place ten years ago was the end of a horrible month long decline of a young man about to be married.

Each year the text of the Yom Kippur liturgy have me re-living those hard moments in an almost minute by minute way.

יום נורא ואיום

Five years later, the day after Yom Kippur I learned that the husband of one of my closest childhood friends died that day in Israel.

So I go through Yom Kippur and the hard day after with my heart in tune with the sadness and pain that my dear friends experience each year..

Since those two hard deaths both families have experienced marriages, a birth and an impending birth.

The great joyful events don't erase the pain. I assume the pain flavors all of the family events going forward.

It would be cruel and a lie to tell either family that somehow magically they will be mended

All I can do is tell my friends that I dread this day alongside them every year.

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Connecting with the past

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sarah in nyc

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