Livre d'Or

I left my old job and my old life exactly a month ago. I like my new life better, though there are lots of things I miss. One of the big ones is my old community, so it was very good for me to be able to visit them to lead the High Holy Day services.

I like my new job. I'm working with a bunch of people, both in my department and across the inter-university project, who are like me: mostly ex-academics, people who are really passionate about education but have taken various twisted and serendipidous routes to get to where they are today. I think one of the things I was missing about research is having a project to work on, with a bigger aim than just getting through the next bit of teaching. And learning, being in a new institution and a completely new field means I'm on a really steep learning curve, which is always the situation that makes me happiest. And I'm doing well at learning fast enough, too; I'm spending most of my working hours surmounting manageable challenges.

I'm definitely liking commuting by bike. I still find the busy bits of Cambridge roads a little scary, but I'm finding my cycle commute quite mindful time, I'm working hard enough both physically and mentally to keep me present, but it's not completely all-encompassing, so it's time when I can think without getting lost in my own head. I'm hoping that the habit will be firmly in place once it starts to get dark and cold.

The shape of my week is better too. I have get to spend evenings being part of my partners' lives. Some with jack at home, cooking together, making progress on chores and admin, talking about our days without having to make special time for it. Some with OSOs and their children, who have also been joining me for lunch some days – I work in a part of town exceptionally well supplied with cafés. And there's more room for socializing with friends too, I've been to one poly meet and one Thursday pub so far, but that's already quite a lot more socializing than was part of my life in the past several years, and I hope there will be more when I'm not in the whirlwind of moving and starting a new job. Weekends have been so much better without the travelling. I get to actually make Shabbat properly, which I'd really been missing. And I can see people on Sunday without having to rush away by 4 pm, and have a date with one partner that don't leave everybody else feeling deprived.

What I don't have a lot of is time for just spodding; I'm keeping up with reading my social media streams, but not posting as much as I used to when I spent most weekday evenings being basically bored. I'm also spending less time hanging out on chat programs hoping someone will show up, which means a bit less contact with some of my long-distance peeps for whom that is the preferred method of socializing. I would definitely appreciate it if people could email to arrange a time to chat; if it's pre-planned, I can easily do IM / text chat, voice calls, or video calls, but it's much less likely you'll just happen to see me online.

Jewishly, I've come home in lots of ways. I'm back in the intellectually oriented, lay-led, engaged Reform community where I spent my teenage years, surrounded by people who've known me for a quarter century. And I seem to have found myself volunteering to teach cheder, so I'm working with the Yr 4 and Yr 5 kids on Hebrew reading. Things have and haven't changed in twenty years; one of the girls from my first Sunday school class when I was a teenager brought her oldest to start cheder on my first day. And at work, putting out feelers about interfaith opportunities, I've found myself a Bible seminar who meet once a week to study and discuss Revelation (!) There's going to be more of this once I'm settled, but right now it's just really comfortable and good.

Still, it was absolutely the right decision to return to Stoke for the big services. My funny little barely viable, officially Orthodox community, where nobody really knows what they're doing liturgically, but they're absolutely brilliant at being a community, and making everybody welcome. They were so pleased to see me, and all their complaints of not knowing how they're going to survive without me included mentions of all the people who have already stepped up to the plate to keep things going. adam_in_rabbinical_school's mother hosted me, and was amazing at giving me food and everything I needed and then leaving me alone to prepare for the services rather than expecting me to be a sociable guest.

The Rosh HaShanah service was one of my best. I kept up the flow throughout the double service, and there was a real atmosphere of being joined together as a community. On the eve of the festival I preached about coping with change, or indeed with stagnation, and how to use the Ten Days for transformation. And during the day my sermon was about shofar: the loud, completely overwhelming sound, that you can't overthink, it just is. The use of a natural animal horn, combined with the skill needed to make an instrument and to get a good sound out of it. (Our teenager, my former bar mitzvah student, did the blowing.) Tekiah, the basic call, is our relationship to nature, we can use it for our purposes including holy ones, yet we must respect and listen to the natural world. Shevarim is the sound of broken things and broken hearts, the call to repair and to heal. And Teruah is the alarm call and the weeping of our enemies.

Yom Kippur worked too, I think. The newly appointed warden did as brilliant a job as her predecessor of sorting out the logistics, and between us we managed to give everybody a role in the service, including reading passages in English, opening the Ark etc. Everybody was there at least for Kol Nidrei and Shacharit, and the people who leave early insisted on staying for my sermon even though I explicitly told them it was their opportunity to leave. My sermon on KN was about the unattainable image of a perfect Yom Kippur, and what it represents in terms of being emotionally moving yet intellectually authentic, connecting to one's own past and to tradition, and how all these things come together to make not an aesthetic experience but a real connection to the Divine.

And on the day I talked about God, which is always a risk for a sermon, but I think it was appreciated. I looked at the almost contradictory tone of the High Holy Days liturgy, where God is both more distant than usual, far beyond human thought, awesome, terrifying, executing judgement, and also closer than the rest of the year, a loving, kind parent, sometimes even a friend or lover. As exemplified by the very well-known piyyut where we address God as 'Our father, our king'. I touched a little on theodicy, pointing out that much of the poetic material in the machzor comes from the time of the Crusades, from the one English piyyut about certain belief to the great and characteristic prayer from the Kedushah about the awe of the day of judgement. I disclaimed that just because I'm fairly fluent in Hebrew it doesn't mean I know the answer to the question of why God allows good people to suffer, but I cast it as a valid question, one that we can bring into the YK liturgy if we approach as our full and authentic selves. Among all the contradictions and difficulties and trying to cast God in human language, the only thing we really know about God is the Thirteen Attributes, all of which describe God as the one who forgives sin.

There was a random Muslim guy there; someone had invited him to join us for a Friday night service as he was curious about Judaism. But he hadn't realized that this particular Shabbat was also Yom Kippur. And he wanted to ask a lot of confused questions; in his view if scripture is the revealed word of God, it should be clear and obvious with no need of discussion or interpretation... He also asked when we first started allowing women priests, which really needed a lot of unpacking. Thankfully the community realized that leaving me to educate this visitor was a bit much so they jumped in and helped to explain. I normally don't allow curious interfaith visitors on YK, it's too personal and emotional, not to mention being a very long service during which we are all fasting, to deal with outreach. But on this occasion it worked out very well; the visitor came back for Minchah with his wife and daughter, and joined us to break the fast.

It was good to visit my community, and it was especially good to come home once the services were done, rather than returning to my little bachelor flat on campus. I am somewhat sad that I'm missing the excitement of the new term starting; it's freshers' week here too, but I am not directly student facing any more so I'm quite detached from it. But other new things are starting, and in 2017 / 5778 I get to embrace the new year with my people, and that's a wonderful thing.