Here comes the sun...

This morning my blogger friend, Feta (of Please Judge Me fame) called and woke me at 5:30 a.m. After I hung up on her and spent the next thirty minutes plotting her gruesome death, I climbed out of bed and dressed. Feta was waiting for me on my uptown corner of Columbus. We hopped into the gypsy cab and headed downtown (but not too far).

Where we, two bloggers (and therefore underemployed) going at such an early hour when neither of us had actual paid work scheduled for the rest of the day? To bless the still hiding sun.

On the roof of the JCC and to the tune of the Beatles' Here Comes the Sun (of course), we joined a growing group of other Jews, some of whom were on yoga mats to say Birkat Hachama, which is a very short blessing said every 28 years when the sun is supposedly in the same position as it was during the creation of the world.

Note the use of the word "short." The blessing is just five words long. So why did the event on the roof last for at least 45 minutes?

Because of the hippies. 

First of all, there were the yoga mats (not enough to go around, by the way) and doing sun salutations absent the sun in the frigid spring air (it snowed later).  As the class went into downward dog, the teacher cried out, "Your tuschies are smiling!" When I later told a gay friend, he said, "I don't think my tuschie smiles." No sir, his does not. Cause he is an atheist.

Though sun was clearly ascendant, judging by the color of the sky, we had not yet begun. The leader, in between sets of chanting, warned us that when we finally get around to saying the blessing we should remember that we are not worshipping the sun but the One who created it. 

I rolled my eyes. As far I was concerned, they may as well have been worshipping the sun for all the resemblance it bore to the God I was raised with in the sect of Joyless Orthodoxy (a part of the Mitnagged movement). The sun worshippers' God was warm and friendly and most of all loved them. My God and my former gymnastics coach share a philosophy- suck it up.

This is  where I'll end the post since my seder is about to begin shortly. And I think "suck it up" is the right philosophy to go into Passover. God does not love you. Nor do the rabbis who speak in Its name cause love means not having to eat matzah for eight days and clean behind your stove, or getting a new toothbrush. 

Passover is God's way of telling the Jews to "suck it up."