BEGINNINGS
X Beginning The Consciousness of Calendar: Being an editor — like being most anything at all — is a chance to learn, and some of the most interesting learning is in and about matters quite distant...
...Yet there is no question at all that just that has happened...
...In this issue, we move through the new year season, beginning with a recollection of an unusual Rosh Hashanah incident, moving to a haunting Yom Kippur memoir, then on to some suggestions for breaking fast, concluding our opening section with instructions for building and decorating a Sukkah...
...They cavort, and swelter, according to their own — and the world's—clock...
...We had known about that, since all monthly magazines confront the problem, and have to do their best at being timely in spite of it...
...It is as if, after the heaviness of the Ten Days of Awe, people are eager to let loose for a while, to move from religion at its most abstract to religion at its most palpable...
...It is already Suk-kot for us, and a small part of us has even moved forward beyond Sukkot, all the way to mid-winter, whose issues are already being planned...
...But living in two time zones, as it were, has at least one benefit...
...But, having so recently doubted that we could ever come to like Sukkot, and do it, and having been so pleasantly surprised on that score, there is no special reason to doubt that we can, in the years ahead, surprise ourselves again by adding understanding, meaning and intention to our joy...
...But we had not realized, until lately, how out of phase this would put us with the rest of the world...
...in El Paso, Texas, sukkah-building is becoming an "in" activity...
...We are required — since the rest of the world moves blissfully through the conventional calendar — to keep MOMENT'S calendar to ourselves...
...The early satisfaction of rediscovery will ripen from fad to fact only as we move from competence at the extrinsic symbols of the holiday towards understanding of its intrinsic message...
...Now that we have discovered that we can like Sukkot, we will soon have to ask (as Ben Halpern once suggested in a related context) whether we can also mean it...
...In the meantime, may all of us know peace, gladness and fulfillment in this new year...
...In the midst of summer's languor, we are bound to seek the meaning of renewal and atonement, and we can do so quietly, without regard for whether last year's suit still fits, or which chazan will be chanting the Kol Nidre in the overflow service, or whether the tensions that inevitably attend the family's coming together at holiday time will be bearable...
...Maybe it's ecology, maybe it's our increasingly desperate desire to take full advantage of what's left for us to celebrate...
...If, ten years ago, anyone had suggested that ten years later, more, rather than less, American Jews would be celebrating Sukkot by actually building a sukkah, he would have been thought absurd...
...There's something disconcerting about that, like getting the morning newspaper three days late, knowing that what's fresh and new for you is already forgotten by others...
...It's just each of us and the holidays, all by ourselves, no excess baggage to divert the attention or distort the intention...
...In Cleveland, a leading temple offers an annual "Sukkah cum laude" award for the best sukkah built by a congregant...
...whatever, Sukkot has come alive again, and that is surely happy news...
...Sukkot is one of the surprises of American Jewish life these days...
...So, for example, I write these words in the midst of summer's heat, knowing they will be read in the season of the High Holidays...
...And that forces a kind of private celebration of the holidays that their appointed time does not allow...
...And if the price we have to pay for that is that by the time the holidays really happen, they will be a deja Jew experience, that doesn't seem too high...
...All across the country, one encounters Jews who have just begun to discover the joys of this delightful holiday...
...X Beginning The Consciousness of Calendar: Being an editor — like being most anything at all — is a chance to learn, and some of the most interesting learning is in and about matters quite distant from the conventional job description...
...We live now with a split sense of time, one foot marching in stride with our fellows, the other several paces ahead...
...The demands of our artists and typesetters and printers, as of the Postal Service, require that most of our manuscripts be in hand many weeks before they reach our readers...
...in New York, Jack Weiler's "Sukkah in the Sky," perched atop 42nd Street at 6th Avenue, can no longer accommodate all who want to enter it...
...But soon — about the time these words will be read — it will really be Sukkot, and we will celebrate the holiday for a second time this twelvemonth...
...But the people near us seem not to know that their children are back in school, that the birds have flown south, that another year has passed...
Vol. 1 • September 1975 • No. 3
