Sunrise, Sunset

“I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory.”
--Elie Wiesel


Fig. 1 My Nature Coast sunset

On Wednesday, 12 September 2007, I went to the beach with my sister. It was a typical sun-kissed September day, and some fluffy clouds rolled in the late afternoon, just in time for a photoshoot during the “Magic Hour.” Before hopping into the car, my sister grabbed her camera, and I grabbed handfuls of sand from my Zen garden and I put some in my pockets.

We drove out to Pine Island, which is just about the smallest beach in existence. It’s a spit of land on the margin of a saltwater marsh connected to Nature Coast scrub prairie by a long but modest two-lane limestone dirt causeway. The road winds out to where a handful of stilt houses have taken up residence, along with a small park skirted by white quarried sand trucked out there for the enjoyment of sunbathers and castle builders.

Pine Island is almost never what you’d normally define as “populated.” By Santa Monica standards, PI is as deserted as a beach on Pluto, hosting more seagulls and almond-sized crabs than humans. It’s one of the Gulf Coast’s many little secrets that require no more than direct knowledge and $2 for parking (and even that is waived after a certain hour). When the neon-cheddar-orange disc of the sun dipped into the Gulf of Mexico, we emptied our pockets into the water, symbolically casting off our sins and problems from the past year and letting the tiny waves carry them away.


Fig 2. Suck it, sin!

My sister, the natural photographer, got some great shots of this event. A Pine Island sunset is remarkable enough without ushering in a religious holiday, but hey, the more spiritual significance, the merrier. Ushering out the old year with water, sand and warm autumnal sunsets appeals more than a cold January garish ball drop several latitudes away.

That was our first Rosh Hashanah.

When I first decided to study everything, I began with investigating holidays. Everyone loves an excuse for getting out of work and spending a day full of music, food, and fireworks with the occasional James Bond movie marathon.

Fig. 3 Daniel Craig: Good for the Jews
(see Munich & Defiance... seriously, go see them)

Jews have accumulated an impressive number of holidays not because it’s so ancient (Hinduism beats it by a thousand years or so) or because they’re particularly self-congratulatory (all the Woody Allen self-deprecation says otherwise), but because the Torah focuses so much on remembrance and preserving memory of the Tribe’s incredible history. For eighteen minutes of that incredible history, try downloading The Tribe short film from iTunes. Best two sheckels ever spent. See also: West Bank Story. I think it won "Best Use of Hummus in a Short Subject Film" at the Oscars.

There are a lot of fasts and feasts throughout the year, but there are fourteen that will show up in the most religiously aware of wall calendars, and they’re all fun to pronounce: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Shemini Atzeret, Simchat Torah, Chanukah, Tu B’shvat, Purim, Pesach, Yom HaSho’ah, Yom Ha’Atzmaut, Lag B’Omer, Shavuot, and Tisha B’av. They last from one to ten days (depending on who you ask), and they’re brimming with all the mentally enticing symbols and customs my culturally titillated heart adores.

For me, 5768 (according to the Hebrew calendar) was a do-it-yourself year of becoming less of a blatant shiksa, and I still enjoy my new traditions of celebrating the big ones in my own freestyle way.

Fig. 4 Not kosher

Next weekend, I’ll post my reflections on Chanukah (Hanukkah, whatever, as long as it has 8 letters, it's spelled right), which begins this year at sunset on December 11. It’s one of the few Jewish holidays that manifest with a small, dedicated section of the seasonal greeting cards aisle in Target, along with an endcap shelf containing menorahs, candles, and decorative gel window clings. So break out your dreidels and latke recipes and your Yiddish dictionary and join me for some oil-soaked fun!