My Sabbath
by Elizabeth Cortez-NeavelIt was winter time, and my mother had arranged for my younger sister and me to travel to Denver, CO and on to Boulder to visit with her Aunt Barbara and Uncle Tom. Barb and Tom had a son and daughter, my mother's cousins, a woman named Tamara and a young man named Joshua; aged twenty-seven and twenty-five respectively. All four of this lively family visited us almost every Thanksgiving holiday to renew our bonds of kinship and deepen our laughter lines; lines that delved brilliantly deep into the faces of our elder relatives. But this winter holiday we would shorten the period of time between our embraces, and have less to talk about when the question "So what is new?" was asked. My sister and I boarded the plane ourselves, on to adventure in a snowbound state, accented with glorious mountains and potential memories. We were going to go visit them during the Christian—and now American—New Year holiday.
The vacation from our befuddled, undecided Texas weather was welcome. Although the area surrounding my Great-Aunt's home held only small patches of hardened snow—ice-like until a boot hard enough overcame its crusted exterior and sank into the softened crystals beneath—my young sister and I would exclaim "Snow!" with wonder—a word that we had, during the past four years, only said following the phrase "I wish it would..."
We greeted, lounged about, and shopped with Barb's side of our family tree for a few days, waiting with bound enthusiasm and reserved energy for our trip into and under and through the Rocky Mountains. After a New Year's Eve excursion to Denver to witness semi-amusing fireworks and very amusing tipplers, four-and-a-half glasses of three different kinds of champagne, a scuffle over what suitcase to take with us on our three-day pilgrimage to pay overdue homage to the snowboarding deities, and the rental of four snowboards (one for each traveler under thirty) and all temporal items needed to please said deities, we embarked to our long awaited Jerusalem.
When you snowboard it is as if the sky is begging you to swim in it but the ground is too greedy to let you go for long. The white, hard-packed powder crunches under your board as if a million micro-icicles are falling upside down into the sky, and the piece of waxed plexi/fiber-glass is all that is stopping them from floating into the oblivion of illusion blue, and sometimes veiled gray. Some might liken the fleeting of the human-made board-that-is-one-with-the-bearer to flying, but I disagree. The sensation is as if you are just about to take off and shed the mortal skin but have not yet attained enough speed; so always you push yourself faster and faster. Even if you leap into the cutting air, you are once again earthbound in a matter of seconds, your angel wings not yet spanning their true length. I have likened it to angels; some might say snowboarding is like God.
My great-cousins are Tragers. They were born from the daughter of a German-Jew, who traveled to America with her husband, who fought in the American revolution, whose children's children were respectable and in the whiskey business (meaning when alcohol bans were enacted, they turned to the faith and became prominent Rabbis and Rabbis' wives). Their children have become authors and college professors and married into many, many good Jewish and non-Jewish families; the more endearing Tragers producing multiple branches of the family tree. My cousins and Great-Aunt and Uncle withhold and maintain their heritage and its practices. They keep kosher when at home, but aren't truly Orthodox; they are more liberal minded and accepting, but aren't too reformed.
It must be rapturous to belong.
Friday night found our muscles sore and our bodies exhausted, but our first day of snowboarding had been a success, and our hearts were elated as we fruitlessly tried to keep our hunger in check as we lay on the floor by the remote-controlled fire. The owners of the condominium we had rented kept their weekend home a bit over-warm, but we welcomed the extra heat to thaw out our numbed, icy limbs. And Friday night is the Sabbath.
Great-Aunt Barb had set out two slim, white tapers in a make-shift aluminum wrap candle holder and was holding a lit match to each one in turn. The rest of the family sat erect—or wobbily stood on weary legs—as all, except Elena and myself, began to bless the lit candles and the grape juice substitute now being decanted into the hand-crafted glasses:
Baruch ata
adonai,
eloheinu, melech ha'olam,
borei p'ri hagafen.
Amen.
Blessed is Adonai, ruler of the universe, who makes the fruit of the vine. Thus it is and may it always be.
Tears filled my eyes. They came of
their own accord, I did not understand why, but I knew they had been hiding
behind my eyes, waiting for my lately all-too-sensitive emotions to call them
from their elusive mystery down the smoothness of my cheek onto the dry carpet
below. I sipped my 'wine' and brushed at my damp face.
Barbara broke the
half-loaf of bread, its egg-buttered crust shiny and its creme-colored insides,
cottony and soft.
Baruch ata adonai,
eloheinu, melech ha'olam,
asher kidshanu b'mitzvotav v'ratza vanu
b'shabat kodsho
b'ahava uvratzon hinchilanu,
zikaron l'ma'asei
v'reishit.
Ki hu yom t'chilah l'mikraei kodesh, zecher litsiyat
mitzraim.
Ki vanu vacharta veotanu kidashta m'chol ha'amim.
B'shabat
kodshecha b'ahava uvratzon hinchaltanu.
Baruch ata adonai, m'kodesh ha
shabat.
Amein
...because Adonai selected us and blessed us from among all the peoples...
It must be rapturous to belong somewhere; it must be glorious to have a set history; it must be empowering to be chosen, selected, blessed.
I know now why I wept then.
After I tore and bit into the holy bread, the ritual—not unlike the Christian Holy Communion (where you eat of the Christ's flesh and drink of the Christ's blood) despite the Jewish belief that the Messiah has not yet come—dampened my spirits, not only with my quickly banished tears, but with my ache of loneliness; my faltering grasp of the knowledge I held about my place in the world.
I know now that my subconscious had been mourning the rebirth of my desperate desire to believe in something simple and beautiful and easy to set values upon. I had been mourning the rebirth of my yearning for a religion.
Ever since I was old enough to realize I was different, I knew the reason why I was so; I did not follow the other religious trends that my fellow classmates were born into, for I wasn't born into any of them. I was agnostic. So as I learned about Middle Eastern religions and European religions, I began to believe myself connected to different aspects of them; I began to explain my views on the afterlife and before-life, and on my past lives as a camel. I was in fifth grade, and I still believed I could heal wounded trees, and commune with nature. And I could, only no one else would believe me, so I lost faith in my imagination and creativity; the closest thing to a religion I had.
I remember those short, confused times, and my recollections of that Friday night in Breckenridge, CO, and realize that I ached foolishly, yet not with a foolish cause. I may not have felt a part of the simple, weekly Jewish ritual of the recitation and meaning of the Kiddush, but earlier that day I had kept my own Sabbath, and had been at one with something so simple, so beautiful, and so facile that the magnitude of it had eluded me. I had let myself be sustained only in the moment as I lifted my wings and flew across the steepening multitudes of hard-packed snowflakes—all intricately individual, yet all alike in their frostiness—not knowing that my almost-numb feet were still earthbound.
I had been intoxicated by the pain in my thighs, the pain that screamed to me "You're alive!" So enfolded in the elation that my heart felt rushing across the earth and falling and flipping up and racing again through time as if it were nothing and everything being spent at once—so ensnared was I—that I had failed to realize that I was more myself than I could ever be (except when writing, of course). I was my own goddess, my own sacred deity, and the beautiful simplicity I belonged to was not only the human race, but the entire earth which we inhabit.
I know that now. I know that although I may ache and long for a human-made "Religion," I am my own, and everything I do is a ritual that reminds me of the sacredness of myself and the people whose lives I touch. I know that I likened my experience in the snow and on the mountain to the angels, when I should have remembered I am part of the god in us all.
That day, that yesterday not so long ago, I learned to skim the ocean of snow, ricocheting between earth and sky; gliding just before the wind and just after the sun. But it is now that I learn I can truly fly.
Thus it is and may it always be.
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Last updated on Saturday, April 19, 2008.
