The High Holy Days - A reflection

While getting in the mood for Yom Kippur, I found this reflective piece I wrote last year about an encounter on the plane back to New York - what actually happened, and what, perhaps, I could have done differently.

Normal service, with a new chapter of Radiance, should begin again next week. If you're keeping Yom Kippur I wish you gemar chatima tova - may you be sealed in the book of life.

    “Are you learning gemara?”
    I crane my head, surprised and interrupted by the previously nondescript young man sitting two seats over, raising his voice over the background roar of clouds and jet engines.
    “Yes, I’m about to,” I respond.
    The flight from Heathrow to JFK is long and drawn out, a skein of wool pulled across oceans and stretched between worlds. My seat is resistant and makes me squirm, though it still feels good to sit at all after the long day and night of standing before God. The gates are closed now, and so I sit, and prepare to prepare for normal classes to resume.
    “Could you study in the memory of my friend who passed away, Jessica Spengler?”
    (I don’t know if I looked at him then, though I like to imagine that I took a moment, a pause, to see who was sitting next to me, the man himself. But maybe I didn’t. Maybe I never saw him at all.)
    “She wasn’t Jewish,” he adds.
    “Of course I can,” I say, opening my computer and firing up the PDF of the second chapter of masechet Shabbat.
    We say no more.
    I sit on the plane in my uncomfortable seat, struggling to understand the details of the coverings of the tabernacle - could they receive impurity from overhanging a dead body or not? - in the memory of a non-Jewish girl I’ve never met, whose name was Jessica Spengler.

 *  *

    “Are you learning gemara?”
    “Yes, I’m about to.”
    “Could you study in the memory of my friend who passed away
        Jessica Spengler?”

Of course, did she pass away recently?
Did you know her well?
Did it come as a surprise?
How old was she?
    Who was Jessica Spengler?
    What was her life?
    What was her death?

I’m sorry to hear it.
My name’s Roni, by the way,
What’s yours?
Good to meet you.
Were you on holiday in England? Do you live in New York?
    Who are you?
    What is your life?
    What is your death?

Why don’t we learn together?
With what may we kindle and with what may we not kindle...?
    Who are we?
    What keeps us aflame?
    What extinguishes the fire?

Do you want to say a prayer for her?
    God full of compassion...
        Who by fire and who by water...
            Who in his time and who before his time...

We look in each others' eyes.
A connection is made.
Deep
and
Profound.

We become facebook friends and never speak again.