The Person Next to You

I dislike articles that begin with, “I am sitting on my lounge chair looking up at the….”.   It likely probably stems from my early essays that all began that way.  I mistakenly assumed that people would be interested in what I was doing on a Wednesday evening in April….

Anyway. 

As I stood this year on the bima marveling at this wonderful community of people who gathered to pray on Yom Kippur evening I was struck was the wide variety of people that comprise our congregation.  We are all Jews with the same collective history and unconscious but that is where the similarity ends.

We came in fine clothes from the most posh and fashionable stores, recently obtained clothes from Goodwill, and with an amazing scale of skin tones.  We had every conceivable color present!  Straight, frizzy, curly, done-up, shaved close, blonde, gray, dyed, and black hair.  People with serious addictions to food, alcohol, pornography, drugs and gambling.  Entrepreneurs and thieves.  Tzaddiks and scoundrels.

There were gossipers and rubber-neckers, swindlers, cads, and altruistic saviors.

Transsexuals, bisexuals, homosexuals, heterosexuals, people faithful to their partners for life and others who were not.

Then the Hazzan began to intone, just before Kol Nidre, “I hereby declare it is permitted to pray with sinners.”  At that moment all barriers dropped.  No one was better than the next.  All became equal in God’s eyes (always that way actually) and more importantly, in one another’s eyes.

To be rid of judgmentalism is utopia.  It is perfection and exactly what G-d wants from us.  Forget about what you heard about disparity of wealth, learning, class, orientation, or color, what really divides humanity is being judgmental, believing that someone unlike us, is worth less.

I’d like every day to be Yom Kippur (minus the fasting) when pretense is stripped away and we all stand before God knowingly naked and indistinguishable from one another.  Death is like that.  But it would be a shame if we wait for the end of life to teach us the ultimate lesson of life.  We are all the same.