Talking to the ladies

Nearly every year during the Rosh Hashanah holiday I see or hear something that becomes the memorable thing that stays with me for the rest of the year.

This year it happened as I was passing my friend Shmuel's seat on my way out of services. As I passed, I noticed that, rather than using one of the many popular Israeli machzorim (holiday prayer books), or a prayerbook from one of the many modern American Jewish publishing houses, he had a tattered copy of the old Birnbaum machzor sitting in front of him.

It caught my eye because during my early years of becoming observant, the Birnbaum weekday, Shabbat and holiday prayer books were all I had known. I had been given a well used set by the navy chaplain in my home port of Pearl Harbor, and they had sailed with me around the Pacific and Indian oceans for many years before going into semi-retirement amid my growing collection of Jewish books.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with the venerable Birnbaum prayer books. They were workmanlike, clear, and contained everything one needed to get from beginning to end of any service of the year.

But they lacked the faux leather binding and preachy philosophy of the Artscroll books that would come along later, and at some point, orthodox congregations became too sophisticated for the old cloth-covered stand-by.

When I asked Shmuel why he was still using the Birnbaum when there were so many other choices out there, he just smiled and began flipping through the threadbare volume in front of him. Every few pages he stopped and showed me a page with a faint lipstick smudge near the top.

I didn't understand what he was trying to show me and watched as he thumbed past several more pages similarly marked with crimson smudges.

After a few moments of enjoying the obvious puzzlement on my face, he explained that this was a machzor from the synagogue in New Jersey where he had grown up. He told me that as a kid in that shul, he had watched the old ladies - many of them survivors of Hitler's Europe - praying with their own brand of devotion... and occasionally giving the pages a kiss before setting them down in their ample laps.

He explained that he still used the tattered old Birnbaum machzor instead of one of the many modern choices available in the Jewish bookstores, because it allowed him to spend a few moments of each Rosh Hashanah talking with the long-departed old ladies of his childhood memories.

How could he not gain strength from this machzor, he asked me, when any page turn might reveal some smudged token of old-world reverence for this threadbare volume and the words it contained?

Of all the things I saw and heard this year during Rosh Hashanah, this is the one that will stay with me this year.