Shamai Grossman
Tue, September 26, 2023
Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could take all our regrets in life and throw them out with the trash? Better yet, what if we could reassign them, so that they are no longer ours? Why not indulge tonight without suffering the consequences tomorrow?
The Jewish world recently observed Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and a week later, Jews observed Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
One of the most accepted practices on Rosh Hashanah, and sometimes on the days following Rosh Hashanah leading to Yom Kippur, is the custom of Tashlich. The etymology of the word, which literally means “cast off,” is based on a verse in the book of Micah, “You will cast off (tashlich) your sins to the depths of the sea.”
So, this year, on the afternoon of the second day of Rosh Hashanah, which fell on September 17, after a long morning in the synagogue followed by an elaborate festive meal, many Jews strolled to the closest lake, pond or body of water. When they arrived, they recited the words from Micah. Many symbolically shaking out the contents of their pockets over the water.
The history of ‘shaking off’ one’s sins is hundreds of years old
In Judaism, a 600-year old custom such as Tashlich is considered new. It was first sourced by Maharil (Rabbi Yaakov Moeling) in 15th century Germany. Why was this relatively late practice largely accepted across the spectrum of Judaism, spreading from Ashkenazi communities via the Lurianic Kabbalists to Sephardic communities the world over?
Tashlich’s acceptance is easy to understand. Here is an opportunity to strip away our iniquities simply by shaking out our indulgences directly into the sea. Rather than blaming ourselves or even someone else, the depths of the waters will wash our sins away, or, as we say repeatedly in the High Holiday liturgy, “whiten them as the snow.”
Rabbi Elijah of Vilna, the famous Vilna Gaon, was among the few who refrained from accepting the Tashlich practice. Yet, he never explained his reticence. We can only conjecture that his concern lay in questioning whether people’s morality could be restored by simply uttering a few words and symbolically shaking out their clothing.
A moral code requires moral behavior.
Visceral reminders help people to reflect on the importance of the holidays
In truth, the custom of Tashlich, like Rosh Hashanah itself, is an opportunity to enable a new beginning. However, this new beginning is two-pronged. First, we have to throw away our old behaviors, and then we have to make a commitment to embark on kinder and more meaningful behaviors, in short, better behaviors. Shaking away our sins on Rosh Hashanah afternoon is meaningless if it is simply a prelude to the beginning of a new cycle of inappropriate behavior.
My late father Rabbi Rafael Grossman, senior rabbi of the Baron Hirsch Congregation in Memphis, knew that people needed visceral reminders, both of the sins lining their pockets and of the opportunities to mend those pockets. Every year he would end Tashlich with song and dance, moving not just his body, but his heart and soul into a joyous new frame of mind. He knew that to start anew would require a new frame of mind.
I wish for all of us to follow my father’s example of leaving the old and joyously embracing the new, thereby committing to a restored, virtuous tomorrow. We then can make Tashlich and Rosh Hashanah, along with the entire coming year, meaningful.
Rabbi Dr. Shamai Grossman grew up in Memphis and is now associate professor of medicine and emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School, and vice chair for health care quality, Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur: An opportunity for renewal, restoration
On Sukkot, the Jewish ‘Festival of booths,’ each sukkah is as unique as the person who builds it
Samira Mehta, Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies & Jewish Studies, University of Colorado Boulder
Tue, September 26, 2023
Natural materials like palm fronds, tree branches or reeds typically create the top of the sukkah.
Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
Sukkot is a Jewish festival that follows right on the heels of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, Judaism’s High Holy Days. The harvest holiday, which begins on Sept. 29, 2023, lasts for seven days when celebrated in Israel and eight days when celebrated elsewhere.
Like many Jewish rituals and traditions, from lighting Friday night candles to hosting Passover seders, Sukkot is primarily celebrated in the home – or rather, in the yard. Translated as the “Festival of Booths,” Sukkot is celebrated in an outdoor structure called a sukkah, which is carefully built and rebuilt each year.
As a Jewish Studies scholar, much of my work looks at how diverse Jewish American identities are today. From intermarried families, to Jews of color, to Jewish communities from all over the world, there have always been a myriad of ways to be Jewish – and home-based holidays like Sukkot help people honor all these parts of their identities.
Michal Sumdon, left, of Poland, and Taul Juin, of France, build a sukkah in the heart of a historic Jewish neighborhood in Warsaw. AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski
Sukkot is a Jewish festival that follows right on the heels of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, Judaism’s High Holy Days. The harvest holiday, which begins on Sept. 29, 2023, lasts for seven days when celebrated in Israel and eight days when celebrated elsewhere.
Like many Jewish rituals and traditions, from lighting Friday night candles to hosting Passover seders, Sukkot is primarily celebrated in the home – or rather, in the yard. Translated as the “Festival of Booths,” Sukkot is celebrated in an outdoor structure called a sukkah, which is carefully built and rebuilt each year.
As a Jewish Studies scholar, much of my work looks at how diverse Jewish American identities are today. From intermarried families, to Jews of color, to Jewish communities from all over the world, there have always been a myriad of ways to be Jewish – and home-based holidays like Sukkot help people honor all these parts of their identities.
Michal Sumdon, left, of Poland, and Taul Juin, of France, build a sukkah in the heart of a historic Jewish neighborhood in Warsaw. AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski
Harvest holiday
Held during the autumn harvest, Sukkot likely has origins in huts that ancient farmers erected so they could sleep in the fields. Yet tradition also says that these booths represent the tents that the Israelites lived in while they wandered the desert for 40 years following the Exodus, their escape from slavery in Egypt.
Some aspects of Sukkot happen in the synagogue, including special prayers and readings from the Bible. Yet the main action takes place at home, in the backyard sukkah – the singular form of the word “sukkot” in Hebrew. For Jews who observe the holiday, tradition says to start building the sukkah as soon as possible after Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement; some people even start building the structure are soon as they have broken their 25-hour fast.
The makeshift walls, of which there must be at least three, can be made out of anything one wants, from pre-made walls printed with blessings said during the holiday to tablecloths or rugs. People often decorate to say something about who they are: photos of Jerusalem, quilts made by relatives. I have always imagined that, if I had a sukkah, I would use Indian tablecloths for walls, merging that piece of my heritage with my religion.
Held during the autumn harvest, Sukkot likely has origins in huts that ancient farmers erected so they could sleep in the fields. Yet tradition also says that these booths represent the tents that the Israelites lived in while they wandered the desert for 40 years following the Exodus, their escape from slavery in Egypt.
Some aspects of Sukkot happen in the synagogue, including special prayers and readings from the Bible. Yet the main action takes place at home, in the backyard sukkah – the singular form of the word “sukkot” in Hebrew. For Jews who observe the holiday, tradition says to start building the sukkah as soon as possible after Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement; some people even start building the structure are soon as they have broken their 25-hour fast.
The makeshift walls, of which there must be at least three, can be made out of anything one wants, from pre-made walls printed with blessings said during the holiday to tablecloths or rugs. People often decorate to say something about who they are: photos of Jerusalem, quilts made by relatives. I have always imagined that, if I had a sukkah, I would use Indian tablecloths for walls, merging that piece of my heritage with my religion.
People in Jerusalem pick out palm branches for the roofs of their sukkot.
The roof, however, is supposed to be made out of natural materials like palms or branches; one friend of mine likes to use cornstalks. The roof should provide shade but must allow gaps to see the stars. Those of us who do not have yards can get creative with our balconies or, like me, drop hints that they would welcome invitations to other people’s sukkot. One New Yorker friend turns her living room into a faux sukkah – you cannot see the stars, but it is filled with nature and decorations.
In the United States, many families decorate their sukkot with classic elements of the American harvest season: corn husks, colorful dried ears of corn, harvest gourds and even the occasional bale of hay. In New Mexico, you sometimes see “ristras,” the decorative red strings of chiles that hang from porches.
The traditional plants of Sukkot, however, are four distinct species: a citrus fruit called an etrog, and fronds of palm, myrtle and willow, which are bound together and referred to as the “lulav.” The lulav and etrog are blessed and shaken together on a daily basis throughout the festival.
Shaking the lulav after a blessing for a snack.
Our yard, our holiday
Beyond this, Jews are supposed to live in the sukkah for the festival, which technically means eating and sleeping there. But as with all religious holidays, individuals celebrate Sukkot in a wide variety of ways.
Many Jews do not construct sukkot at all, let alone sleep in them for a week. Of those who do, some sleep every night in the sukkah; some have one night of family “camping”; others do not sleep in it at all. Many people entertain guests there: I have been to many a meal – and one graduate seminar – in sukkot all over the country.
It is the fact that so much of Sukkot is held at home that accounts for the holiday’s immense flexibility. Like at Passover, most Jews who celebrate Sukkot encounter it in spaces where people can honor their values, cultures or histories.
What this looks like is as diverse as the world of American Jews.
For instance, for the years that I taught outside of Philadelphia, I attended a multinight open house, called “Whiskey in the Sukkot,” hosted by an interfaith couple. The Jewish wife explains that when she and her husband – a whiskey aficionado from Appalachia – got married, his thought process went: “harvest festival, grain, whiskey.”
Each year, he curates a selection to share with his guests, with new offerings for each night. Accompanied by pungent cheeses and other nibbles, this festival of whiskey offered him a way to make the holiday his own. In the process, the couple created an event that welcomes their Jewish – and non-Jewish – communities.
Ruth Sohn decorates her family’s sukkah with Egyptian designs in Los Angeles.
Stephen Osman/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
On his Afroculinaria blog, the chef, culinary historian and author Michael Twitty created a Southern harvest soup for Sukkot, which he notes uses “traditional Southern ingredients and flavors.” His soup is vegetarian, but he also offers a “trayf alternative,” meaning a version that is not kosher – a recipe that swaps out olive oil for bacon grease. Even in the most liberal Jewish settings, one cannot usually serve pork in a synagogue setting, but this is your Sukkot table. If you, like most American Jews, do not keep kosher, why not go full-on Southern in your flavors?
Not everyone sees their full identity reflected on Sukkot. Emily Bowen Cowen, a cartoonist who is Jewish and Muscogee (Creek), has written a comic called “My Sioux-kot,” imagining what Sukkot could look like if, like many contemporary Passover celebrations, it emphasized social justice. Cohen muses on the parallels she saw between Sukkot celebrations and 2016 protests to block an oil pipeline at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota. At the time, both were events where people talked about valuing nature as sacred. Yet no one mentioned the protests in the sukkot she visited that week.
Indeed, some Jews are finding ways to realize the social justice potential in the holiday. Fiber artist Heather Stoltz used a sukkah as the basis for an art exhibition called “Temporary Shelter,” decorating its walls with stories of unhoused New Yorkers and with art made by children staying in the city’s shelters.
Perhaps the time will come when Sukkot, too, becomes infused with possibilities for a more just future.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.
On his Afroculinaria blog, the chef, culinary historian and author Michael Twitty created a Southern harvest soup for Sukkot, which he notes uses “traditional Southern ingredients and flavors.” His soup is vegetarian, but he also offers a “trayf alternative,” meaning a version that is not kosher – a recipe that swaps out olive oil for bacon grease. Even in the most liberal Jewish settings, one cannot usually serve pork in a synagogue setting, but this is your Sukkot table. If you, like most American Jews, do not keep kosher, why not go full-on Southern in your flavors?
Not everyone sees their full identity reflected on Sukkot. Emily Bowen Cowen, a cartoonist who is Jewish and Muscogee (Creek), has written a comic called “My Sioux-kot,” imagining what Sukkot could look like if, like many contemporary Passover celebrations, it emphasized social justice. Cohen muses on the parallels she saw between Sukkot celebrations and 2016 protests to block an oil pipeline at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota. At the time, both were events where people talked about valuing nature as sacred. Yet no one mentioned the protests in the sukkot she visited that week.
Indeed, some Jews are finding ways to realize the social justice potential in the holiday. Fiber artist Heather Stoltz used a sukkah as the basis for an art exhibition called “Temporary Shelter,” decorating its walls with stories of unhoused New Yorkers and with art made by children staying in the city’s shelters.
Perhaps the time will come when Sukkot, too, becomes infused with possibilities for a more just future.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.
It was written by: Samira Mehta, University of Colorado Boulder.
Read more:
Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur are times for soul-searching, but not on your own – community has always been at the heart of the Jewish High Holidays
Antisemitism on Elon Musk’s X is surging and dredging up many ancient, defamatory themes of blaming Jews
Samira Mehta receives funding from the Henry Luce Foundation.
