Chappy Chags

Shiksa Girlfriend and I moved over the summer, so we decided to take advantage of our new location and go to Evil Minion for High Holidays. Rosh Hashanah was pretty nice, except that Evil Minion, which usually provides excellent transliterations for Shabbos, decided to go an alternate route with the Birnbaum machzor, which provides... none. I attempted to follow along the best I could with my Mishkan T'Filah, but for bizarre reasons there are large chunks of the service which aren't in there and which I didn't even know I was missing (psalm of the day? since when?). That was kind of frustrating. The singing was nice, and the shofar blasts were great, but needless to say, we skipped out on Musaf-- for me, the money-quote is always, "Longest Amidah of the year." Sorry, but there's no way I'm sticking around for that, particularly when I can't even follow along. So we left early and went grocery shopping instead.

Fast-forward to Yom Kippur. Evil Minion was set up at a secret location (another shul sanctuary, while that shul in turn had been displaced to yet another secret location-- yay High Holiday mysteries) and we were looking forward to going. Unfortunately, I came down with this flu-bronchitis-death rattle a few days before, which really took a giant crap on my holiday. Fun times included chatting with my parents and trying to convince them that no, I hadn't planned on fasting while sick. No, really.

Abbot Yid: You'd better not fast.

Me: I wasn't planning on it. I'm bummed, but it's fine.

Abbot Yid: Well... good. Cause I'm telling you, God doesn't care. And even the most hard-ass rabbi would tell you what I'm telling you. Got it?

Me: Yes, just like I did the first time.

Abbot Yid: Seriously, don't do it.

Me: Fine!

It was nice to see some old friends for the holiday (though my persistent hacking made it hard to daven out loud, much less kibbitz). It was very surreal to have to pay so much attention to my breathing/voice volume during prayer to avoid setting off my cough.

The singing was quite impressive-- the Minioneers split the davening up six or seven ways so you got to hear a nice spread. Oh, and because having no functional machzor had sucked so hard on Rosh Hashanah, Shiksa Girlfriend and I sped to the internet and got... much to my chagrin... a transliterated Art Scroll Yom Kippur Machzor. Sigh, I have drunk the Art Scroll kool-aid. Oh well, at least I got a funny post out of it.

Incidentally, not fasting on YK (for the first time in ten years) was a very odd sensation. I kind of felt like I had a bit of an inferiority complex, and then I tried to compensate by not eating a lot during the day... things got kind of weird by the end.

It has come to my and SG's attention that this is our fourth year together, and our fourth year celebrating High Holidays in a different shul. Wandering Jews, indeed.