Sin Repair

 For years, I had been seeing ads like this on bulletin boards around Jerusalem about repair of sins and repair of "the foundation".

Eventually I figured out that what they meant by "the foundation" was one of the Sefirot of Kabbalah, Yesod (whose name translates as "foundation") and is related to the genitals, if the Tree of Life from Kabbalah is overlaid on a human body (ignoring that there's only one Sefira for two feet), Yesod winds up there.  I remember a woman giving a religious lesson about Joseph, who is associated with Yesod (I think because of his refusal to commit adultery with his master's wife) rather bashfully mentioning "the male sexual organ"

So I saw one again last week, I was walking home from a usual late night listening to music at a bar, and there was a break in the cold and rain of Jerusalem winters (it was a balmy 46F), and passed this poster.  So I decided to go and see what it was about.  The instructions said to fast from dawn, and to declare one's intention to do so the following day, but I didn't do that.  I didn't go to mock, just to observe.  Amateur anthropology.

So with a full stomach and well-caffinated, I headed to Yeshivat Hashalom, which is very close to Jerusalem's open-air market, Machaneh Yehudah.  The room looked like it could comfortably seat about 100 people with tables between the rows and was already overfull, and people kept arriving over the course of the afternoon.  In the back of the room there were special prayer-books that the yeshiva had printed, bags of ten-agorah coins (worth 3.1 cents apiece), and there was a certain number of coins in the bag which had some numerological significance that I had missed, there was an amplification system but I couldn't make out all the words sitting in the back which I think people were exchanging for the value of the coins, pieces of electrical wire (the color code in Israel is blue, brown, and green/yellow but there was no blue), and strips of cloth.  An employee of the yeshiva, would occasionally bring up more chairs or supplies in the elevator.

The ritual with the coins involved a text found in the prayer-book, broken up into sections, two people would do it together, each would say one line, put some (I think it was two) coins in the other's hand (as a form of giving charity, it was explained) who would toss them into a basin, basins had been placed on all the tables, and the basins would be passed back to the employee who would empty them into buckets, to the sound of pouring coins.  It struck me that if I tried to guess what an anti-semite imagines goes in in a synagogue, it might be something similar to this.

Some of the prayers were penitential ones, used on fast days and around the High Holy Days.  One, which lists sins, one per each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, was in the prayer-book with explanations of what each sin was in parenthesis, the rabbi read the parenthetical parts as if they were part of the text.

The cloth strips turned out to be "sackcloth" which most people turn on over their clothes.  I did see one person put it under his short, but I felt one, they were only as coarse as industrial carpet, and wouldn't have been painful.  The strips had Velcro at one end for easy fastening.

I don't recall if it was before or after the sackcloth, but then the rabbi said that he wanted everyone to give some some of money that was much larger than what they had paid for the coins, and anyone who didn't have that much cash could write a check, or fill out a form to their credit card company or to their bank to do it in payments.  I'n not positive that I heard the number, but I think I heard that in monthly payments it would be 202 Shekels for 26 months, which is worth $1,619.85.  There was also a numerological explanation for the amount, and I think it had to do with a number of fasts that a person should do to atone for sins, but they could replace it with a payment.  I think it was during the part encouraging people to pay that the rabbi told the story of a righteous man who told his family to avoid visiting his grave for the first twelve months after he was buried, as he would be tormented by demonic forces then for his sins, and it was best if they stayed away, and I think the point of the whole day was not merely to repent for sins, but to save oneself from punishments which even those who repented would be subject to, unless they either did the large number of fasts or payed to be excused from fasting.

After the money and forms were collected, people would walk to the front of the room to hand them in, they began to read from the special prayer-book.  There were different sections that would "correct" various sins. Many, but not all, were sexual, for example having sex with a non-Jewish woman, another man, maturation, a menstruating woman, bestiality (the title listed domestic animals, wild animals, and fowl for some reason, maybe just in case someone was unsure) and one which I would think would be rather rare, with one's brother's wife after his death.  And there were some other sins, violating the Sabbath, eating unkosher food, anger (the rabbi told of a righteous man who would immerse himself 150 times, that being the numerological value of the Hebrew word for anger), but one that stood out was writing an amulet for a pregnant woman to give birth before her time, I can say with great certainty that I had never even thought of doing that.  And there was one that repeat "may sins", it wasn't clear if that meant many different sins that had no specific prayer of their own or just a large number of sins.  Some people arrived only at the end of this, and I was thinking that they missed all the good sins.

At one of the prayers, I don't remember for what sin, people were instructed to wrap the wires around themselves, I could see that people near me were doing it around their legs.  I kept one of the wires as a souvenir, and wound it into a coil.  The rabbi referred to them as iron wires, but they were copper (I checked)

Two notes about the elevator, one is that it had a strip of cloth covering the optical sensor, so the door would stay open and it wouldn't return to the ground floor until the cloth was moved.  The other is that it had a mezuzah, which elevators do not need.

The rabbi also mentioned one sin, I think it was insulting a dead person, for which one should undress and roll around in thorny plants, and there was also something for which people should roll around in the snow.  People who didn't do this last month when we had some snow in Jerusalem, he said, could substitute splashing cold water on each arm eight times and their foreheads three times.

By this time it was time for Mincha, the afternoon prayer, which the rabbi's elderly father led in a very scratchy voice.  There was a long extra prayer at the end, and I watched what people were reading from their special prayer-books (I put on my glasses to see better) and there were many pages with a short prayer at the top, but most of the page was covered with things that were written but looked more like amulets than texts to be read, one example was the name of God, "I am" from Exodus 3, arranged seven to a line, in two sets of three lines (42 isn't just found in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but is a mystical number in Kabbalah, there is said to be a name of God containing that many letters) or other names of God arranged in patterns, for example instead of writing the name Shaddai in three letters, it would spell out the name of each of the letters.

Then there was a very paradoxical prayer, it made reference to Maimonides by addressing God as "the cause of all causes", but was a prayer to be spared the punishments that would visit one's corpse in the grave, something which Maimonides would have called nonsense.

By this time I was cold and hungry, so I skipped Arvit, the Evening Prayer, usually recited soon after the Afternoon Prayer, despite wanting to see the ritual with the cold water in place of the snow.  Around when I left, someone asked when that would happen and the rabbi answered, "snow after Arvit".  There was also going to be food, but I didn't expect that to be very exciting (I sort of expected the ritual where food is passed around, everyone recites a blessing over the food out loud, and everyone else answers "Amen", and then a different food, on which a different blessing is recited follows, and so on, which I believe is the source of "Amen parties"), and the market I mentioned earlier is full of restaurants, both fast-food and sit-down, so I fed myself, went home, and took a nap before heading out for the next night's entertainment, but when my alarm clock went off I was still tired and went back to sleep until the next morning, I slept for 13 hours.  I don't know if this was from standing for several hours (I had a seat at the start but gave it up to get a better look) and being cold and wet (during Mincha I went outside to the balcony where it was cold and drizzling) or from the two nights earlier that week that I had walked home, or the one that I stayed at a jam session so late that by the time it ended, a friend caught a taxi home, and I walked to the bus stop, they were running again because it was morning.

I don't think I'll go to the whole thing again.  Maybe I'll come back another year to see the "snow" and leaf through the prayer-book.  This was the last one for this year.  Some Jewish communities have special penitential rituals during the winter when the first six portions of Exodus are read, their Hebrew names, SHmot, Vayera, Bo, Beshalach, Yitro, Mishpatim, spell "Shovavim" (the same Hebrew letter can be pronounced either V, O, or U) which in the Bible means sinful (translations say "rebellious", "backsliding" or "faithless, in Modern Hebrew it means naughty, Dennis the Menace is "Dani Shovavani" in Hebrew) and in Jewish leap years, which this is, two more weeks are added, for the portions Terumah and Tetzaveh and then it's called Shovavim-Tat although Tat doesn't mean anything in Rabbinic Hebrew (in Modern Hebrew it's the equivalent of the prefix sub-)  

Some Jewish groups only perform special rituals on leap years, others do it every year.  I think Yeshivat Hashalom does it every year.. In any case, the next Jewish leap year is in two years.

One more souvenir that I took was a pamphlet addressed to people observing Shovavim (which mentions redeeming, e.g. replacing with a donation, 84 fasts) that is raising money for an organization to help religious women receive draft exemptions. In the Haredi world, women being drafted is considered a cardinal sin ("one should perish rather than transgress", a phrase that appears in the pamphlet) and in the Religious-Zionist sector, some women do National Service instead of being drafted and some serve in the armed forces.  There are five draft offices in Israel, three of which are somehow (details are absent) handled by this organization, and they are raising money to do the same at a fourth, in Teveria, if enough people donate 100 shekels (about $31) a month, which will still leave Haifa without their proection.

Haredi internet sites (which exist, despite the community's objection to the internet) frequently feature horror stories of women who, they claim, deserve to be exempted from the draft, but were turned down, here is one example.  The only one here is a woman whose request was denied because she left her cellphone (also forbidden by these communities) on over the Sabbath but did not use it.  I don't know what anyone else does, but I put mine in mute, so it won't make noise in case there is a wrong number or a social media notification, but leave it on to use as an alarm clock.