Tashlich Through the Years: From Ex-Pat UK Life to Suburban Mom in New York
In my early 20s as a recent graduate and living on my own for the first time in Manhattan, something about the Jewish ritual of tashlich spoke to me. I’d walk a few blocks over to the East River with stale bread and peer out at Roosevelt Island while I cast my sins away. My sins at this point were pretty basic- did I lead that boy on at the bar last night even though I wasn’t interested? Why did I feign illness at work when a deadline was approaching and leave a mess for my coworkers? Did I make time to visit my family or was I too wrapped up in my budding social life? Was I recycling enough?
But as I grew older, my sins took on new significance. And at the time seemed less trivial. For two years, I was lucky enough to live an expat life in London with my husband. I’d walk a few miles from our flat in Notting Hill to the Serpentine in Hyde Park with days old brioche and begin casting away my sins. These two years abroad were perhaps my most formative and caused me to look at the world with a different perspective. My sins were mostly related to my husband and my co-workers as I was living abroad away from my family for the first time. Did I say sorry to my husband after a fight? Was I too hard on my team at work with my obsession of meeting deadlines and forcing them to miss pub time?
The news there forced me to also look at things from a global standpoint. Was I doing enough to help after the Boxing Day tsunami that hit Thailand in 2004? Was I staying connected to my roots? Was it enough to just go to high holiday services at Western Marble Arch Synagogue and call it a day or did I have to do more to observe the holidays especially now that I had been removed from any familial Jewish guilt related to high holiday observance?
When we moved back to New York and started a family, I found myself longing to take my son in his stroller and walk over to the East River again to do tashlich since we relocated to the same neighborhood on the Upper East Side. Only now everything looked different. Queens, the borough of my birthplace across the river seemed closer than before. And the ritual of tashlich took on new meaning for me as a mom. Was I teaching my son to share enough? Was I truly enjoying the gift of having a healthy son to love or wishing the long hours of new motherhood away because I wanted the next phase where he’d be more independent and less needy? Was taking him to Tot Shabbat services enough or did I really have to make Shabbat dinner and light candles? After all he was still eating baby food then and he thought the flames were actually birthday candles.
Fast forward a few years and I am now the mom of three and living in the suburbs of New York about 30 miles north of Manhattan. I’ve got a lot on my plate so do I really need to do tashlich which happens to coincide with the first month of school? Can’t I get a rain check on tashlich? And the answer is wholeheartedly for me is in favor of this ritual – tashlich to us is more important than ever. I want to teach my kids that it is ok to make mistakes, feel sorry about them and “let it go” Elsa-style but try harder next time, so I schlep them along for this ancient ritual and hope they will one day embrace it with their own families.
As much as I have sinned this year, I love how we can all start with a blank slate and a fresh start. My grandmother, a Holocaust survivor was fond of Anne Frank’s quote- “where there’s hope, there’s life.” And, I love how Tashlich always fills me with hope for new beginnings and a better tomorrow. Because we can all use a little bit of that right now.
