My daughter doesn’t know what the Yamim Noraim are. And that’s good.
One afternoon during this Rosh HaShanah, my 10-year old asked me why Rosh HaShanah didn’t have its own page in a children’s book we’ve had for most of her life, and instead had to share a page with Yom Kippur. Purim had its own page. Sukkot had its own page. Chanukah had its own page. The book gave each holiday its own creative tactile touches — like the removable little “candles” attached with velcro for Chanukah. These wordless touches are meant to delight and educate very young children. Rosh HaShanah got a shofar that could be brought up to a man’s lips as if he were blowing it. Yom Kippur alone had nothing.
Without thinking, I said, “well it’s normal to group the two holidays together as part of the Yamim Noraim, with their themes of teshuvah and the possibility of redemption.”
“What?!?!” she responded incredulously. “Rosh HaShanah is about the New Year and blowing shofar and the Rimon and the apples and honey. Yom Kippur is about not eating.” And “Sukkot is about being in the Sukkah,” she added as our conversation continued.
When I was her age, I didn’t know anything about the things she knows — about these, mostly joyful, holiday practices. I mean, they probably taught me about these things in Hebrew school amid my liberal Jewish upbring in a New York suburb. But we hardly ever practiced any of them as a family in our home like my wife and I do here in Israel. Judaism, with the notable exception of the Pesach seder, was something that was mostly apart from our daily lives and mostly outside our home. And the Yamim Noraim of Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur were something particularly incomprehensible to me as a child, days when, for some inexplicable reason, the adults wanted to spend the whole day in the synagogue. It looked joyless to me.
It’s kind of a miracle that I stayed Jewish at all given the joylessness, and the spiritual poverty of this. But, after drifting away from Judaism for many years, I was drawn back to it as a young adult by discovering our faith’s brilliance around comforting us, around binding us together, amid the darker periods of life. Amid illness. And, especially, mourning. It had such meaning for me after Yitzhak Rabin was murdered to stand with a community and to have a rabbi tell us there was a Jewish response for times like this. And then she led us in reciting psalms.
Those kind of powerful practices will await my daughter as she, God willing, grows towards adulthood, just as they awaited me when I experienced things like my Father’s death. And she will have opportunity to discover the deep theological meaning and liturgical power that is part of both Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, and make it logical that they should be grouped together.
But she will not have to wait for that to feel a deep and rich connection with the Jewish holidays and with the rhythm of their transit through the year. Some of that is due to me and my wife, and the effort we have made to make our home a Jewish one. But so much of the credit for that is due to Israel itself, to the people around us and even the government, with its setting the calendar. When Sukkot comes, it will be a true festival with even the secular kids off from school for the week. Everywhere you look here in crowded Jerusalem, there will be Sukkot “huts” popping up like mushrooms in all the usually empty spaces. Everywhere, you will see people walking with their lulavim and etrogim — the biblical “four species” — on their way to and from shul.
And, before that, Yom Kippur will not be just a time of prayer and fasting and contemplation for the adults. The streets will empty of cars and instead be filled with children on bicycles, experiencing a wonderful once-a-year freedom to move about.
I hope that wherever you live, you are able to find ways to bring the joy of Judaism into your home, especially on the holidays, and celebrate them as most of them are meant to be — as feasts! Feasts of freedom and joy and the power of being together and of knowing that we, as Jews, are part of a chain of tradition as ancient and compelling as any on Earth. Hag Sameach.
