I hope you don’t mind me coming to you like this, Rabbi. See, I just can’t keep something you said last week out of my head. I don’t know if you even recognize me—this was on Yom Kippur? At… Kol Nidrei? Oh, you do! I guess there weren’t too many people in the audience. I’ll admit that was my first time coming to shul since, I don’t know, fourth grade? I was never bar mitzvahed. Let me know if I’m telling you too much or anything… I guess my only context for stuff like this is Catholic confessionals from the movies. 

See, it’s been a year since my father died, and recently I’ve been trying to do more to connect with him now that I can’t do that… face-to-face. Watching his favorite TV shows, reading the books he kept in his nightstand, visiting the locations of his childhood. Your congregation was his congregation when he was living with his father. Who he hated. That’s why I never really got involved with religion. I just went to High Holiday services as a kid when his father was still alive and insisted on taking me. I know you said you only started on here a few months ago, but my father’s name was Elliot Green and his father’s was Jeremy. Maybe a few members of the congregation remember them.

We were never close while he was alive. That’s why I’m putting in all this effort now, to make up for all my years of being a bad son. An absent son, really. I loved him, I’m sure, and he did so much for me, but I never really appreciated him as much as I should have. I guess I took him for granted. He was my father; everyone has a father, and he was just doing his job, you know? But he could have been a terrible father, and he wasn’t, and now that he’s gone, I feel this great emptiness in my life. A hole. I know he used to be more observant when he was young, so I asked my second cousin where the family used to go to synagogue; he gave me this address, and sure enough it was one year since he’d died and the night of Yom Kippur. There I was: staring up at you on the Bima, sitting in a squeaky pew in a suit that fit too tight and my first yarmulke in thirty years. I’d just picked it up from the box at the front door and clipped it to my hair—which only took half a minute longer than it should have. And, well, there I was. I didn’t know the words or the tunes well enough to sing, so I read the English translations of the prayers and tried my best to follow along. 

But the melodies and the words—they did resonate somewhere deep inside me, maybe in my reptilian brain or something, jogging memories buried so deep I didn’t know they existed. Or maybe even more than memories, jogging the feelings of memories, as if this is what I’d been searching for since my father had died, like this was what would fill that vacant hole. 

Before reciting the Shema, you said something I don’t think I’ll ever forget. About how, though the second line of the Shema is sung under your breath during the rest of the year, throughout Yom Kippur you sing it out loud? I liked that. How the reason you get to sing it out loud is because on Yom Kippur you live like an angel: not eating, not drinking, not working. Praying, thinking, repenting. Angel tasks. So on Yom Kippur you get to say that second, sacred line you’re not worthy of saying the rest of the year. Even I recognized the Shema from my childhood when the congregation sang it, so I muttered along too. I got to be an angel, too. Something less than human, but something more. I left at the end of the service and walked all the way home that night weightless. Emptiness had never felt so good.

I couldn’t go to morning services the next day because I had work. But it didn’t feel right going to work on my day as an angel, so I slept in and woke to a world already bathed in noon sunlight. I felt ethereal. I went on a walk around the neighborhood still in my bathrobe and flannel pants and sweaty undershirt, but none of it felt real; I didn’t feel real. My slippers touched the pavement, but I might have been walking on clouds. I watched passersby absorbed in their human tasks: walking twin poodles, fanning out the daily papers at a newsstand, bending down on one knee to tie a child’s tennis shoe. As an angel, everything seemed that much more lovely, that much more human. I walked to my usual bagel spot but stopped before going in. I wasn’t even hungry. I kept walking. 

I walked and I walked until I found myself back in my apartment, lying on my couch just thinking about nothing at all and watching the light and shadows of the tree outside my window dance on the ceiling of my living room. I stayed there until sunset, until my angel day came to a close. 

It was kind of sad, actually, the end. I went to work the next day, apologized to my boss, ate my bagel, drank coffee, and lost myself in the usual spreadsheets and rigamarole. I could have gone back to shul on Friday, for Shabbat services, but this really wasn’t me and I knew it. I’d had my angel day. I didn’t feel holy anymore. I apologized to my father in my head, but I’m sure he wouldn’t have been too broken up about it anyway. Would he have even cared that I’d gone to synagogue for him? That I’d been making any of these efforts?

I went to this play last night that got me thinking again. It was about a father who had failed to save his son in an accident, and the son was still around, just as a ghost only he could see. When we got to the moment toward the beginning where the audience was supposed to realize the son was dead, I heard someone sniffling behind me and turned to see this man at least a decade older than me crying, crying real tears. It struck me how affected he was. And then as the play went on, more and more audience members began to cry, each in reaction to these specific moments, and I couldn’t help but imagine each one had some unique connection to them. Maybe the man behind me had lost a child or was thinking of his own father. The woman who covered her eyes with a hand, maybe she was thinking of an ex-partner consumed by his personal tragedies much like the protagonist. 

And shouldn’t I have been crying too, Rabbi? A play all about family and death, fatherhood ended, about humans and human emotion, all a year after the death of my own father? Did I really love my father? Or was I just as detached in my normal life as I was on Yom Kippur? What if all my days were angel days, and I was never human?
Is it okay to always feel like an angel, or is that sacrilegious? I don’t feel normal, Rabbi, and I thought maybe you might understand and help me, but after saying this all out loud and watching your face I don’t know if anyone can. So maybe I’ll just try being an angel for a little longer, if you’ll excuse me, and see where it takes me. Just a little longer, Rabbi, I’ll try.

Elena Eiss is singing, so perhaps every day is an angel day.