This past weekend marked the beginning of the Jewish new year, and as a Jewish person I decided that I would do my best and celebrate the holiday as best as I could. Unfortunately, I work all day on both Fridays and Saturdays, so I was left to Sunday, the second day of the holiday, to do my celebrating.
To be completely honest, it wasn’t until a conversation with my parents a week or so ago that I even remembered that Rosh Hashanah was coming up. I guess this might provide some kind of hint as to the depth of my religious observance at the moment. In reality, though, I think the last year or so has represented the most dramatic change for my own personal religious involvement, and as a result has led to a serious change in the way that I look at Judaism and my relationship with it as a practical religion.
Despite those changes (and I imagine it’s probably fairly obvious in which direction those changes have pushed me on the observant<-->secular scale), I’ve felt a serious desire to reconnect Jewishly in the last week. I think part of that has a lot to do with the way that, at least for me, Judaism and especially the holidays has so much to do with family. The Jewish holidays are always a time that I love being home, with the familiar sounds of my brothers and sister arguing about something insignificant and the tantalizing smells of my mom’s chicken soup on the stove and brisket in the oven. And now, suddenly, I find myself thousands of miles away from all of that. Of course, being away at college the past four years meant that I wasn’t able to spend every holiday with my family, but even then there was definitely a different sense of distance.
For all these reasons, I was determined to find a Jewish service and meal somewhere in Korea. And who do you turn to when you’re a Jew somewhere very un-Jewish in the world? Chabad, of course! It took only a few minutes of browsing on the cyberweb to find out that there was indeed a Chabad House in Seoul, aka’ed as the JCC of Korea (swimming pool, workout facilities, and goyishe business ethic not included). When I read on their website that they would be hosting services and meals for both nights and days of the Rosh, I signed myself up for the second day.
Sunday morning rolled around, and I was up and out the door by 9 o’clock (very early for English-teacher-in-Korea-standard-time, mind you) to make the hour and a half trip up to Itaewon, where the Chabad House was located. Luckily, I had printed out every piece of map/direction information they gave on their website, because there was nothing resembling a sign or placard anywhere in the vicinity of the building. As I came up the stairs, I was welcomed by two white men standing outside wearing kippot, a sight whose strangeness is hard to explain to someone who has never lived in a place as different from their home as Korea is to mine.
While waiting for services to pick up again (as might be expected, a minyan is hard to come by around here), I got a couple of minutes to mingle with some of the people there- a bunch of other English teachers like me (we make up the majority of the Caucasian population in this country) as well as a couple of American army officers from the base nearby. After a few more stragglers made their way in, services began again, led by one of the rabbis present. The services, which lasted about two hours or so, weren’t particularly engaging, but nevertheless they gave me some time to think about the year that was, which had included some rather important life-changing experiences for me. In the end, that is really what Rosh Hashanah is all about, so I think I got what I had come for.
After services were over, we went inside and enjoyed a nice Jewish-style meal, complete with challah and honey, chicken, couscous, and even some chulent! I’d been craving some Hebrew cooking, so it definitely hit the spot, although also made me appreciate just how much better of a cook my grandmother is than about anyone else on the planet.
Once the meal was through, we went back outside for a quick Minchah service before heading out toward the water to take part in Tashlich (which is, for those terminologically-challenged, a tradition in which we throw bread into a body of running water to symbolize the throwing-away of our sins). That’s right: Tashlich on the Han River. It was a sight to see, as can be attested by the crowd of Korean passersby who watched on in amazement, one of whom even grabbing his cell phone and videotaping the entire event to bring home to his disbelieving wife.
On the walk back toward Itaewon and the subway station, I engaged one of the young rabbis there in a conversation about Judaism. Over the course of 30 minutes or so, we talked about a lot, but mostly focused on the subject of intermarriage and the position of orthodox Jews in the world, particularly in Israel. As you can probably imagine, we didn’t quite see eye-to-eye, and I left the conversation feeling rather unfulfilled and frustrated, the tell-tale signs of a classic Jewish debate. All in all, though, I accomplished what I had set out to do—have a Jewish experience in a genuinely non-Jewish place—and so in the words of one of the great Jewish scholars, Tupac Amaru Shakur, “I guess it was a good day.”
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