High Holidays

[ellenkushner]

Rosh Hashanah, the Birthday of the World, begins next Tuesday at sundown, ushering in the 10 Days of Awe, the opportunity Jews have to take stock of life, pay off old debts, give charity, ask - and offer! - forgiveness, culminating in the fast of Yom Kippur. In 1992 I created a one-hour radio special called The Door Is Opened: a Jewish High Holiday Meditation on Friendship, Family and Forgiveness, which to me are the pillars of the holiday, following the spiritual exercise of those days. It was the genesis of my national public radio series Sound & Spirit (which launched in 1996), and at one point we folded it into the series.

It will be rebroadcast this week on all S&S stations - if you're within range of Boston's WGBH 89.7fm you can hear it tonight at 5 p.m. (or online at www.wgbh.org) - but you can also listen on demand no matter where you are, and pass the link on to others.

Of all the radio work I've done, this to me is the best and most true - I've always felt my entire career in radio was worth it for this. I try to listen to it every year; it's a snapshot of who I was back then, and a litmus for where I am now.

Next week's show, Fathers and Sons (with contributions by Bob Dylan, Benjamin Britten et al), is a penetrating look at the Sacrifice of Isaac story, (read each year on Rosh Hashanah), and the following week we rebroadcast Jonah, one of our most popular shows, in which I read the whole book aloud (as we do in the synagogue on Yom Kippur) and Rabbi Harold Kushner (no relation) delivers his famous dictum, "Those who think the Book of Jonah is about a man being swallowed by a whale are confusing it with Walt Disney's Pinocchio!"

Happy Holidays, everyone!

Comments

[madfilkentist]

Those who think Pinocchio is about a wooden puppet being swallowed by a whale are also missing the point, actually.

I'll have my radio on WGBH at 5.

[enegim.livejournal.com]

I'd actually wondered for some time whether you were related to Rabbi Kushner, so thanks for answering that. :)

Glad I saw this in time; I'll go listen to WGBH in a few minutes.

[enegim.livejournal.com]

Follow-up: That was just lovely. Thank you. I'm trying to re-connect with Judaism, and things like this help a great deal.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Thank you - I'm honored.

[poukledden.livejournal.com]

Well, I guess I know what I'm listening to for the next few Sundays. Or maybe just all at once from the archives, since that's how I have to listen to the show anyway. Bless the internets that expose us to things we'd otherwise miss because our silly local stations don't carry it.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Amen!

[handworn.livejournal.com]

It's a "great fish," isn't it?

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Yes, indeed! From p. 9 of my script:

Much has been made of the fact that God has had this fish all ready and waiting -- in fact, there is a tradition that God made Jonah's fish along with the rest of the world during the original 6 days of creation. In his composition "And God Created Great Whales," Alan Hovhaness incorporated the sound of actual whalesong to depict the origins of life . . .

**Play music, timpani**

This is the place where I have to explain that what swallows Jonah isn't really a whale. The literal translation of the Hebrew words, dag gadol, is Big Fish. The biggest fish on earth--all right, the biggest sea creature--is the whale. But what swallowed Jonah could equally well be a sea monster or even a shark. Big Fish. The important thing is that it takes him in when he goes overboard: "And the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights."

**Play music**

It's a very powerful symbol of initiation from the ancient world: the hero is swallowed by a monster, experiencing death, transformation and rebirth. As the great religious historian Mircea Eliade observed, "one goes down into the belly of a giant or a monster in order to learn ... wisdom..." (Lacoque, 100)

"Initiation," says Eliade, "lies at the core of any genuine human life... [Because] any genuine human life implies profound crises, ordeals, suffering, loss and reconquest of self...." (Lacoque 94) "No initiation is possible without the ritual of an agony, a death, and a resurrection." (Lacoque 100)

Jonah comes to this moment in the whale - but sometime in our lives, many of us experience our own version of it.

***

I believe we're still offering complete printed transcripts for sale - see
http://www.wgbh.org/pages/pri/spirit/transcripts.html

[handworn.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

It reminded me of this passage:

"Nothing can be sole, or whole, that has not been rent."

W.B. Yeats, "Crazy Jane Talks With the Bishop"

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Nice. (And "sole" as in Small Fish?)

[handworn.livejournal.com]

If we just find literature references to Red Fish and Blue Fish as well, we'll have ourselves the makings of a doctoral dissertation on Dr. Seuss.