On Erev Rosh Hashanah 2022 I was driving around doing last-minute errands and while driving in the car heard a segment of a story told over WAMC radio as part of their Sunday ‘Selected Shorts” a short story titled “Books We Read” by Joe Meno, read aloud for radio by an actor. I wasn’t able to hear the the whole story but the part I heard went something like this – and I heard a wonderful Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur Machzor message in it.
It’s about a man in an after-school tutoring center who helps kids with their homework. There’s one boy Alessandro who doesn’t need homework help, but just comes to read the books on the shelves, particularly an Animal Encyclopedia. One day the book goes missing, and Alessandro isn’t seen for a few days after that. The tutor seems to remember that Alessandro left the day before with something bulky under his arm looking over his shoulder. So after mulling this over, the tutor pulls Alessandro’s file, gets his home address and heads over to check on things/retrieve his book. There’s no answer at the door, and no sign of anyone inside so the tutor looks around for the key, finds it above a window sill, and makes his way inside. The house is small, lived in, simple. It was easy to find the children’s room. It was untidy and the tutor looks around for the book, until he finds it under a stack of overdue library books.
Here’s the punchline/spoiler: The tutor opens the Animal Encyclopedia to find that someone (we assume Alessandro) had drawn speech and thought bubbles near the animals on many of the pages. He turned a page on vertebrates and invertebrates into a whole animal kingdom war between them, created conversations between crocodiles and alligators, all kinds of stories.
In short, Alessandro turned a dry factual encyclopedia into a vivid, animated, fanciful storybook. He imagined conversations, created alliances, turned plain pictures into dynamic drama.
Here I am hearing this a mere few hours before the start of Rosh Hashanah…
In a sense (without the physical doodling, of course) we’re supposed to each give our High Holiday Machzor the Alessandro treatment! The goal isn’t to make stuff up, but we should be able to see ourselves, our lives, struggles, challenges and experiences within the pages of our Machzor. It is most meaningful when the words come alive! When instead of relying only a standardized text, we’re reading into it our own stories.
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There’s a beautiful poetic expression printed behind the Samach-Vav of Rebbe Rashab, that expresses this very thing in Chassidic lingo. Will add it to this post soon.