Clara Gee. just reminded me that infamy without the “in” is just famy. Coining words is an old and comfortable custom but it doesn’t resonate with me for suggesting that it was my birthday. It cannot get confused - the 7th is just plain wrong. Today, the 10th of September, is my 82nd birthday.
Just looking at an intelligent calendar such as the ones we receive almost daily (the older ones were from Jewish funeral parlors that kept you abreast of the important dates you should remember about your religion). The newest ones are “Green” from the Sierra Club and “Nature”, magazines that come monthly about the world in which we live. The NRA probably has such a calendar celebrating the big days when someone shot and killed a deer with the largest rack ever recorded. But I am not on their list of contributors.
I think we get it all wrong when we celebrate wars and disasters by putting them on calendars to remind us of bad things. It would be much nicer to remember the good than the bad and the ugly. Days of Infamy should be recalled in order that we learn lessons from them so they will never happen again. The Holocaust is remembered when the deniers get to work and revive the horror all over again by saying it wasn’t that bad and it really didn’t happen.
My birthday is followed not that closely, but it is followed by the Jewish New Year and the Day of Repentance. Rosh Ha Shanah and Yom Kippur will come once again and we will remember that these are days of (in Clara Gee’s words) “famy”.
Carol and I were invited to join the “Choral Group” (it used to be the Choir” of Temple Sinai of North Dade. We will sing the particularly beautiful music of melancholy and pride in having successfully finished one year and ushering in the new. BUT! (and there is always a “but”) before you can live happily in that new year you must own up to the bad things you did in the old one. We really should declare our ownership of the bad things we did and thought and wash ourselves clean of them. Orthodox ritual is filled with a lot of symbolic things but just living in the secular world, it seems right and just that we try to make things right that we did that were wrong. I have no problem with and welcome a day of fasting.
Our Days of “Famy” should be included in the list of special days where we celebrate life while trying to “repair” the world and make it better.