A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-Four-Hundred-And-Thirty-Nine

Tonight is Kol Nidrei and I am missing my father a great deal.  He was not a very religious man, but he always spoke of tonight's service as the most beautiful and special part of the Jewish calendar.  Hearing the melody and prayer of the Kol Nidrei makes me think of him, of how much I wish he were still here. It is not as if I don't miss him at other times.  On any given day, for any reason or none, I can find myself thinking of him, crying yet again.  There is something specific, though, in the way I feel tonight, in the particular shade of grief.  I will not say it is anything worse or more potent, but there is a way in which it strikes me, a combination of loss and a sense of the sacred.  Kol Nidrei is largely about being released from certain obligations of the past, and Yom Kippur, as a whole, is about moving into the new year without the sins of the previous one.  They are ancient rituals which help anchor me to a cultural identity and which are all about moving forward into the future with a clean slate.  It is the balance of remaining rooted in the past and still being prepared for today and tomorrow.  So much of mourning feels entrenched in that same struggle/

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