What did the Holy Days mean to you?

It might be my age. It might be what our world has become. It might be weariness of the whole thing. This year’s High Holy Days had a whole different effect on me. I have written before that I was raised in a home that could be called “Not Jewish.” I didn’t celebrated my bar mitzvah until I was 40. My family never went to synagogue until I had children of my own.

It was, as I have written, my father. His father, my grandfather, was again, as I have written before, a dyed-in-the-wool Socialist. His father, that would be my great-grandfather, was a nasty, unforgiving and, according to family his...