How it really was: Days of nostalgia, purity and awe

There is a subtle change in the air, and even in Jerusalem, an autumnal tinge touches the day. Nothing though as obvious as Toronto in September, with its more decided change of temperature, and the beginning of the maple and oak and chestnut trees changing their leafy green for what in a few weeks will be a splendor range of yellow, orange and bright red.

As a child, I loved the onset of the High Holy Days, heralded by hints of encroaching autumn. My parents, who lived on my father’s wages, nevertheless always outfitted my sisters and me with new outfits – a suit, a shirt, a tie for me, new blouses and skirts for my older sisters, and for our baby sister, whatever new clothes matched her growth from toddler to schoolgirl.

My suits were not, in those early years, off the rack. “Makhn a soot,” was the Yiddish, somewhat Anglicized, “to make a suit.” Doubtless there was a tailor from either of the two shtetlakh who would measure me, a little boy full of grown-up pride, and after one fitting, provide me with a suit, two-piece when I was very young (short pants and a flared-back jacket), and a three-piece like a grown-up by the time I was 10.

There was a very ceremonial visit, sometimes just my father and I, to the big department stores of the times, Eaton’s or Simpson’s, to be measured for shoes. They had a magic gadget to make sure of a correct fit. One would step up onto a raised small platform, the size of a weight scale. The fluoroscope X-rays would flicker from below one’s feet and at chest level, one could lean down into a viewer and see the bones of the feet and the surrounding shoe. There were also viewing slots for a person accompanying the one being fitted and for the salesperson, usually a male. (It took many decades to finally ban these fluoroscope viewers.)

Once properly attired for the High Holy Days, there came the mysteries called, in our jargon, slikhes, (slihot), the nights of special “penitential” prayers, especially those on Saturday nights preceding Rosh Hashanah in our local Ashkenazi tradition. The truly pious, like my grandfather, would continue the slihot prayers every morning after that before the morning service.

As a child, I knew I could not go to these mysterious prayers, which usually began at 11 p.m. Once I did become old enough to go on my own I found too much repetition, though I devoutly chanted off the merciful attributes of God too many times.

The mystery continued on Rosh Hashanah itself, when the entire men’s section, a few hundred, all immigrants from Poland, would kneel and fall flat on their faces, while the hazan, using the awe-inspiring High Holy Day chant, recalled the magnificent rite of our ancient Temple. It was a wall-to-wall carpet of tallitot (prayer shawls), off-white wool with black or occasional dark blue stripes.

Even in my older years, this has always stirred my inner Jewish soul. In the one year I prayed at the Heichal Shlomo in Jerusalem, close to 45 years ago, tears came to my eyes when the cantor, Naftali Hershtik, fell to his knees, while his young son standing next to him prostrated himself side by side with his father, in a custom perhaps closer to three than two thousand years old.

But I did not grow up on cantors, rather on ba’alei tefila, prayer leaders, laymen who had a pleasant voice and knew the style in which the prayers were chanted or sung. The entire congregation in the various synagogues I grew up in would chant, after a lengthy recitative by the hazan, a sing-along, giving him the breathing break he needed.

I was picked by the oldest son of the best ba’al tefila of that time in Toronto, Itshe-Mayer Korolnek, to join the other sons as a “meshoyrer,” in our Polish Ashkenazi pronunciation, a word that beggars translation. It does not mean a member of the choir but rather one of a small group of backup singers. This was when I was age 13 to 15.

When the stooped, bearded Itcheh-Mayer fell on his face, he would first skip back one pace, feet always together, and then it was so moving to see his two sons help him to his feet and hold on as he skipped back to the podium facing the open ark. His medium tenor and perfect pitch were joined with body and hand movements that expressed his full identification with the text.

His rite – our rite – always was punctuated by the hassidic tunes that inserted hope and joy into the severe fear and trembling confession of the more somber prayers. As Yom Kippur ended, his tall oldest son, Herschl, would whisper in Yiddish the number of minutes remaining, so that his father would bring the fast to an end exactly on time.

The high-pitched voices of women weeping at poignant times in the prayers, such as that preceding the shofar blowing, fell upon our ears from the women’s section an entire upper floor above us. While most of the men knew what they were saying, few women did, and in the Ivri-Taitsh prayer books they used, the Yiddishized Taitsh would instruct: “Do vaynt men” – here one weeps. And they wept, in fear and anguish. All had suffered in the “Old Country” and in the transition to the New. All had left behind a parent, a sister, a brother, entire families. It was in the midst of World War II, and years had passed with no word. The women wept and some men did too.

Jews always have a time to weep, and a need to hope, and a time to laugh... 

Now we bridge close to eight decades. Decades of prayer unanswered, “a million candles burning for the help that never came.” The style of prayer must exist today in the hassidic prayer houses of the haredim. But that style is a parody of the native Polish-Romanian-Hungarian broad Yiddish accent and mispronounced Hebrew of the Old Country, now canonized and so holy that it is perpetuated by the various hassidic sects. The Ashkenazi Hebrew of the Old Yishuv and the Lithuanian mitnagdim seem more authentic. But they are locked into a non-existent world. In my early years here, I prayed with different sects at various times.

There is no going back.

The reality is not exactly what we expected. Everything has changed. The purity of immersion in nostalgia and its hopes have morphed into the terrible beauty of the great reality we have created. If the Almighty created the State of Israel, we ask, why did He not smite the killers before they extinguished the millions of candles?

There is no return to the simple days that we each recall. An American author realized this so well. Thomas Wolfe, in a posthumously edited novel published eight decades ago as well, wrote, “You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood... back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame... back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of time and memory.”

But Wolfe was not Jewish. In our Days of Awe and prayer, we do go back “in time and memory.” To my father, a skeptic, kneeling, “falling on his face,” and pulling me back across many Diasporas, to a back-sliding people in a Land of Milk and Honey, and pulling me forward to a land my offspring will help fashion.

And I shall be their nostalgia.  ■

The writer attended Orthodox services most of his life, and studied at Orthodox afternoon yeshivot, Yeshiva University, and the Jewish Theological Seminary. He has been a prayer leader in Orthodox synagogues. Though not an ordained rabbi, he has conducted High Holy Day and other services in Conservative and Reform congregations in North America and in Dundee, Scotland. When he did, he would often ask the congregants to meditate in silence for a few moments. He now asks his readers to do the same.