I'm glad the holidays are over and we can all be normal again

Every time I blink I'm in a sukkah

I’m peering into a ceramic vagina at a small screen playing a stop motion animation of a clay figure dressing itself up as a nurse. I’ve dragged my husband to the “arts district”. It feels so good to get out of Beverly Hills, sometimes, which is something I’ve been saying a lot as a joke lately. I was recently at a Beverly Hills art fair where a lot of the paintings had American flags in them. Real folk art kind of stuff, but by people of a certain age and income. A lot of technically genuinely talented people who create highly complex and realistic images of big bosomed rainbow skin alien looking women. I try to imagine who would buy a painting like that and where it would go. Multiple booths were selling pieces obviously heavily inspired by Basquiat, some doing the same with Alec Monopoly, and just as many combining both. Talented, yes, but deeply misapplied. Peering into the ceramic vagina is refreshing.

It is good to get out of Beverly Hills actually. “Nobody in Beverly Hills has curly hair,” one of my friends observed. We were standing in a coffee shop in Echo Park where everybody looked like they climbed out of a Tik Tok into a Chappell Roan concert. We popped up to Montreal for Rosh Hashanah and a friend who employs a lot of Gen Z kids told me that they’re all in polyamorous relationships and hating it. Complex webs of polycules merging and breaking up. They became old enough to date and strategized about how to make it worse for everyone involved. And don’t ask them about Israel.

The shul in Old Port is full of French-from-France people who smoke openly just outside. I’m a firm believer that Jewishness should be sexy – I married Persian after all – but these people knock it out of the park and it pisses me off. This is the year I’ve decided to finally feel something while I pray but all I can think about is that my haircut makes me look fatigued and my skin feels like it’s going to turn to dust. At home (in BH, BH) the people at my shul observe a form of completely sexless Judaism, symptomatic of a uniquely American brand of Modern Orthodoxy. Like I’ve mentioned before, sometimes you’ll show up to somebody’s house for Shabbat dinner and they don’t have wine and nobody else brought wine. A lot of people who are NOT good at hosting meals but they’re amazing at forming committees, drafting and reviewing bylaws, and offering long shiurim with no food. 

I still love them and we’re back on the scene for Yom Kippur. I’m amazing at fasting and I never taper off my caffeine before. It takes all my willpower and energy not to tell everyone during the day. I love peering over into the women’s section and taking inventory of all the different combinations of white dresses and beige cardigans they’re wearing, wrapping themselves in both arms and telling everyone how cold they are. Some of them are even wearing little fingerless gloves. It’s my first time staying for Yizkor on account of it being my year, and I don’t find out until weeks later that most people don’t go to Yizkor until after their year is over. I’m there anyway, hoping to use this time to get to the bottom of this feeling that grief is something that has been happening to me but I have not been quite able to wrangle myself. But everyone else is also there on account of the war and I feel a spark of resentment because I was hoping for a minute alone. My tallis, heavy bright white wool, is too big for me and I pull it over my head and cross my arms. I get my moment when everyone leaves the room and Yizkor unfolds as usual, but only long enough to mumble through a psalm or two.

When we have dinner with my BIL and his wife, she asks me if I’m still working remotely. I don’t tell them about my layoff or my brief foray back into the startup world that ended in flames. Only that my new job is nice and that I really like it. She tells me that ChatGPT will replace me eventually anyway so I’d better enjoy it while it lasts. There’s a rabbi at the shul in the Five Towns where my brother-in-law goes that’s been on fire lately. He’s charismatic and gives long, meaningful intense drashas. My BIL says that the guys take adderall before so they can focus and pay attention. This is unusual because the people out there aren’t usually the spiritual type. “They have no middos,” I’ve been told by a friend who was born and raised on the Upper West Side. We sit around his sukkah and go back and forth the meaning of “heimish”. One person says it means homey and friendly and comfy, that it invokes warmth. Another person says it just means frum. I suggest it has something to do with covering your furniture in plastic and having a big crystal chandelier with flourescent white cold hospital lights. My husband says something about men piling around trays of kugel and stomping it into the carpet. Around the corner, our other friends are piled in their own sukkah. I joked that it was biblically accurate because the guy who made it built it out of real sticks and palm fronds, which are abundant in LA, and the effect looks like a structure you’d stumble across in a forest, if forests had palm trees. We sukkah hop and talk about how lucky we are to live in a neighbourhood with all of our friends, in California where sukkot doesn’t suck like in Canada. It’s like being in a village. 

On Simchas Torah we made 200 stuffed mushrooms for a crowd at the shul and stood behind the bar carefully portioning out pre-mixed cocktails – a pornstar martini cheekily renamed a “shirat chana martini.” People came up to the bar surprised we were serving alcohol. We accidentally cremated the brisket in the crock pots with too long of a cook time and lack of liquid to last throughout the long holiday. Outside, the entire boulevard that runs through the shtetl was closed off. A thick, humid fog dropped over us. It was the real who’s who of Pico. Journalists and leftist podcasters rubbing shoulders with people my husband went to high school with. It felt like being a teenager wandering around the fairgrounds after hours, a little drunk and mischievous. The lubavitchers set up a mechitza on the street for dancing. Out in the middle of street on an otherwise ordinary weeknight for everyone else but here we were all suspended in time, like a piece of fruit in the centre of aspic, cushioned by a three day yuntif and real fog and day whatever of what basically amounts to a holy bender. A rabbi gave out shots of gasoline flavoured vodka to men who promised to wear tefillin just once (I poured mine into a bush), and somebody gifted me an illegal menthol bubble gum flavoured cigarette, which I shouldn’t have touched on account of my skin looking like a crustacean but it was a really delicious treat. I make a plan to feel spiritual again, once and for all, listing out the things I can do, where I can take action, like I can build a connection to Hashem out of blocks. Maybe I will actually put on tefillin, maybe I will learn a little bit every day, maybe I will go to shul on time, maybe I will run more and lift more and drink less, maybe I will put on sunscreen every morning and stop treating myself to cigarettes – but I love to feel the sun on my face.