Selichot – the services before Rosh hashanah and Yom Kippur that are supposed to motivate the soul to begin the process of asking for forgiveness, are very big here. The normative American Ashkenazi practice begins the saturday night before Rosh hashanah (or the week before if Rosh hashanah starts on a sunday night). The sefardic tradition is to do it for the whole month before Rosh hashanah through Yom Kippur and often involves doing this service before sunrise at 4:30 am (which I haven’t done yet but hope to next week) or late at night. There are services every day. I went to two this past week which were very interesting. The first one was a musical sefardic selichot with a number of different middle eastern instruments. It was a collaboration of a number of different organizations coming together. One interesting (and new to me) thing was that when they recite the 13 middot, they also blow the shofar – to intensify our prayers.
On thursday night, I went to another selichot which was taking place at the tahanah rishona (an old train station turned into an upscale outdoor mall with restaurants and stores – like U Village in seattle). This one was lead by a city community leader, a leading conservative rabbi and a leading orthodox rabbi and a number of musicians and paytanim (liturgical poets). Very interesting mix of people attending from secular to religious. People coming for the whole time or stopping by after dinner. With contemporary prayers and traditional prayers and music and much hope for the coming year and desire to see every from a place of love and humanity. Really interesting to see people fighting sectarian tension by coming together to create a pluralistic welcoming space. Also, very interesting for it to take place in a very public space – accessible to all and trying to include those who would not walk into a synagogue. One of the rabbis spoke about the metaphor of how we’re pliable to make ourselves into who we want to be and our challenge is to take up this challenge to figure out how to be kinder, more present and more actively fighting for justice and compassion.