The Soul Is Yours, While The Body is Your Servant...
Certain moments come every year and bring their own annual feeling. Selichot have been a routine for me since I was a kid. Always on Saturday night, they begin. As a kid I remember riding going to movies with friends and then going to shul for Selichot. I don't remember the details but I think I once rode my bike there late at night, though it sounds so unlike something that could have really happened to me. I confess that I remember doing Selichot after a movie as an adult as well...
The poetry of the Selichot is so beautiful. I imagine the authors rolling in their graves as we mumble through their profound images and rhymes. On the other hand they may smile just to see us reciting their words in the middle of the night still, after all this time.
posted by rabbi neil fleischmann @ 1:35 AM
4 Comments:
We need to hear from other women on that. I don't remember girls going, till I was older...
That's a problem everywhere. People don't feel connected to the selichot because they (we) don't understand them and no one bothers to explain them (to us) and we don't take the time to understand them ourselves...
I haven't gone to selichot in a while. I may have to blog on the JC about it. Don't mean to shill for that here, so to the point I'll say that I don't remember women being there either.
Mirty, McAryeh, Jack - Thank you for thinking about and taking the moment to comment about selichot. It's an age old problem. My father, he should live and be well, who is an avid reader of this blog, has told me that he has strong memories of from childhood of selichot being buzzed through in an unstimulating way. It's so sad that it's not done in a more meaninful way. I find that even when these types of things are explained (as when on Tisha B'Av there are explanatory recitals of the Kinot, which are in some ways similar to the Selichot) it's done in a Talmudic style, stating name of author, style/pattern of the writing, time written, topic, rank, serial number. But it's not presented as the spiritual poetry/meditative experience that it's meant to be.
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