Facing my mortality, the Book of Life is no metaphor

I almost didn’t make it to Yom Kippur last year.

Driving to the Kol Nidre service, on the long road connecting Melbourne’s northern suburbs to its more heavily Jewish-populated south, I sat in peak-hour traffic contemplating whether I should turn around. Yom Kippur had always been my favourite chag. It has so much to offer the secular cultural Jew: the coming together of community, the opportunity for reflection, the ancient, repetitive rituals that cleanse the soul. Sitting for hours in shul, I often found myself surreptitiously crying at some point, succumbing to the solemn and pensive atmosphere of a community in deep introspection.

I felt at home at this shul, a secular-humanist music-based congregation - Kolenu - that centres humanity instead of God. The congregation sits in concentric circles, the musicians at the centre, forcing everyone to face one another.

But last year, I didn’t want to face my community. I was seething, picturing everyone performing the dramatic spectacle of chest pounding, shuckling and earnest prayer. I didn’t want to metaphorically plead, yet again, to be inscribed in the Book of Life – I felt that I had already done that enough this year, quite literally with my doctors. Imagining people engaging with life and death as an abstraction, only to be able to leave it at shul, filled me with rage.

Admittedly, this anger may have partly been due to the steroids pumping through my body. That morning, I spent eight hours in hospital undergoing yet another obscure test to determine whether I was in remission from Cushing’s Disease – a rare disorder from a pituitary tumour that causes excessive cortisol. Despite being minuscule, on a part of the brain the size of a pea, the tumour wreaked havoc, forcing me to be hospitalised five times within six months.