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Sept. 30, 2005
The season of awe begins anew
Rosh Hashanah is about counting our blessings and seeing beauty
in our everyday lives.
RAHEL MUSLEAH
Every holiday has its aura. Pesach has a scrubbed cleanliness;
Purim, a cookie-dough indulgence; Sukkot, a back-to-nature thankfulness.
Rosh Hashanah has its aura, too. For most of us, it's one that begins
a season of awe, judgment and repentance.
For me, the start of a new year is a time of blessing and renewal,
a different focus than what often feels like a lofty liturgical
solemnity. I'm not suggesting party hats and confetti, just a little
more optimism and joyfulness. Except for dipping apples in honey
and sharing a holiday dinner, home rituals that create memory are
largely missing from Rosh Hashanah.
In this respect, families of Sephardi and Mizrahi origin have a
secret to share with the rest of the Jewish world. On the first
night of Rosh Hashanah, we hold a special ceremony at home, during
which we recite blessings over a variety of foods that symbolize
our wishes for the new year. The ritual is called a seder yehi
ratzon (may it be God's will) because we ask God to guide us
and provide us with bounty, strength and peace in the year ahead.
Many of the foods are blessed with puns on their Hebrew names that
turn into wishes that our enemies will be destroyed.
The talmudic origins of the seder date back to a discussion by Rabbi
Abaye about omens that carry significance. (Horayot 12a) He suggested
that at the beginning of each new year, people should make a habit
of eating the following foods that grow in profusion and so symbolize
prosperity: pumpkin, a bean-like vegetable called rubia, leeks,
beets and dates. Jewish communities throughout the world have adapted
this practice, creating seders of their own.
So my shopping list for Rosh Hashanah includes fat, juicy, red-skinned
pomegranates; glossy, sticky-sweet dates; apples that will blush
spicy pink when they are cooked into preserves with a drop of red
food coloring and whole cloves; savory pumpkin; pungent leeks or
scallions; foot-long string beans (available in Indian shops); and
deep-green spinach. Often, my parents and my children prepare the
foods together. It's an art to separate the jewel-like pomegranate
seeds without splattering their scarlet juice all over the kitchen
counter; to split the dates, stuff them with walnut halves and arrange
them in concentric ovals on a newly polished silver dish.
The foods become vessels for meaning, effective because of their
tangibility.
"Before Rosh Hashanah, I try to concentrate on the content
of the day," said my friend Marilyn Greenspan, "but repentance
and reflection give way to thinking about what I'm serving for dinner."
The seder makes it not only forgivable but desirable to think about
such practicalities.
"The physicality of the seder is what makes it special,"
said Rabbi Karyn Kedar, author of Dance of the Dolphin: Finding
Prayer, Perspective and Meaning in the Stories of Our Lives,
who has adopted the practice from her Sephardi husband.
"It's not just cerebral. It's 'getting dirty' with Judaism.
It starts with cutting onions in the kitchen and ends with blessing.
Both converge in being Jewish."
We begin the seder itself with a series of biblical verses that
carry mystical significance, followed by a declaration that always
sends shivers down my spine: Tahel shanah u'virchoteha! (Let
the year begin and all its blessings!) It's a dramatic moment in
its specificity, because this moment and no other ushers in a year
that will so the verse says unquestionably bring blessings
in its wake. I like that positive spirit.
Then come the blessings: First, the dates. "May it be your
will, God, that all emnity will end. May we date this new year with
peace and happiness." (The word for end, yitamu, sounds
like tamar, the Hebrew word for date.) Second, the pomegranate:
"May we be as full of mitzvot as the pomegranate is full of
seeds." Apples: "May it be your will, God, to renew for
us a year as good and sweet as honey." String beans (rubia
or lubia): "May it be your will, God, to increase our merits.
(The word for increase, irbu, resembles the word rubia, bean.)
Pumpkin or gourd (k'ra): "As we eat this gourd, may
it be your will, God, to guard us. Tear away all evil decrees against
us as our merits are called before you. (K'ra resembles the words
"tear" and "called.") Spinach or beetroot leaves
(selek): "May it be your will, God, to banish all the
enemies who might beat us. (Selek resembles the word for banish,
yistalku.) Leeks or scallions (karti): "May it
be your will, God, to cut off our enemies. (Karti resembles yikartu,
the word for "cut off.")
Originally, the seder called for a fish head to represent fertility
and a sheep's head, to symbolize our wish to be heads, not tails;
leaders, not stragglers. The sheep's head (the brains were removed
and cooked) also served as a reminder of the ram that saved Isaac's
life: we recite the story of the binding of Isaac on the second
day of Rosh Hashanah. In my family, we discontinued using these
last two items: the fish because its Hebrew name, dag, sounds
like the Hebrew word for worry, d'agah; the sheep's head,
for obvious reasons.
I think about why we couch our wishes in the form of blessings.
"Blessings make you pause and acknowledge beauty, goodness,
and God's presence," Kedar writes in her first book, God
Whispers: Stories of the Soul, Lessons of the Heart. "For
half a second, if we are doing it right, the world falls into sharp
focus and we are centred and armed with a new perspective."
According to the Shulhan Aruch, we are required to say 100 blessings
a day, beginning by articulating our simultaneously simple and complex
wonder that our life is renewed each morning. "Count your blessings,"
we often tell ourselves and our children. Count your family, your
friends, the food on your table, the ability to speak and listen
and see and breathe. Because it's often easier to complain than
to express gratitude, enumerating each blessing eases the process.
What does it mean to ask for a good, sweet year? I struggle with
the nebulousness of the adjectives. What constitutes sweetness?
What shapes goodness? I think it's harmony and wholeness we are
asking for the ability to take the parts of our lives that
may satisfy us disparately and put them together so that they create
contentment. Through these simple foods, we ask for the ability
to appreciate the basic goodness of our lives.
Kedar, who lived in Israel for 10 years, recalled that after a terrorist
attack, mothers who picked their children up from school let them
pick any candy or ice cream they wanted from the corner grocery
store. "We wanted to bring sweetness and comfort to their lives
in the guise of chocolate," she said. "Blessings, like
chocolate, sometimes seem like a luxury."
Because the seder doesn't focus exclusively on sweet symbols, it
mirrors the realities of our lives. The bitter truths, fears and
emnities we live with mix with the sweetness. Life is not just beginnings;
it is also endings. It's not just honeyed dates, it's also the sting
of scallions. It is about uncovering blessings, despite the elusiveness
of peace.
I am not very good at enduring the bitterness. After I take the
tiniest bit of scallion possible for the blessing, I wash away the
unpleasant taste with sweet apples and dates. Maybe it's just my
aversion to scallions, but through this small act, I can increase
the positive while asking to be shielded from the negative.
Finding direction and beauty in our lives through the basic fruits
of the earth allows us to push aside the chaos that clutters our
days and uncover the goodness and sweetness of time. Often, said
Rabbi Nina Beth Cardin, we use up so much energy deflecting the
onslaught of the world that we become numb to its beauty. "It's
like being in a bakery too long," she explained in her book
The Tapestry of Jewish Time: A Spiritual Guide to Holidays and
Lifecycle Events. "The smell is still there, but we no
longer notice." She recommends trying to move through our days
as if we always had a five-year-old at our sides to point out all
the important things we usually miss: the bugs on the sidewalk,
whose turn it is to sit in the front seat, the color of the M &
M that tastes best.
The seder points to a specific direction by which to achieve sweetness:
the blessing of the pomegranate asks that our lives be filled with
mitzvot. Some mitzvot like lighting Shabbat candles and blowing
the shofar are a language of action that mark us as Jews,
Cardin explained. A second type of mitzvah includes acts of fairness,
justice and loving-kindness that we do for each other, from honoring
parents to visiting the sick.
"Our lives are lived in the details of the everyday,"
she said. "Taking a co-worker to lunch for a job well done,
writing to praise a company for its stance on the environment, thanking
a teacher for an inspiring lecture, showing good humor and patience
with those around us while waiting in line each of these
brings a bit more goodness into the world. They are the keys to
the storehouse of holiness. It is in the performance of these humble
deeds that we become more."
While it is up to each of us to take responsibility to "become
more," we ask for God's partnership in the process. That's
how our Rosh Hashanah blessings differ from secular New Year's resolutions.
God's guidance enables us to rely on our own strengths.
"The Jewish New Year isn't about losing 10 pounds or quitting
smoking," said Kedar. "Nor does 'shana tovah' translate
as 'happy New Year.' The word tov (good) is not, 'Was the
movie good?' 'Yes, it was fun.' It resonates back to Rosh Hashanah
as the time God created the world and saw that it was good. Shana
tovah means that we hope the foundations of our lives should have
a goodness to them."
Tahel shanah u'virchoteha! Let the new year begin with all
its goodness and all its blessings.
Rahel Musleah is an award-winning journalist and author
of Apples and Pomegranates: A Rosh Hashanah Seder. Her website
is www.rahelsjewishindia.com.
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