What a pleasure it was to celebrate my first high holidays with this striving community. I want to take a moment to thank the vast number of individuals who worked diligently behind the scenes to ensure that things flowed smoothly during our Days of Awe.
You probably already know one of my favorite parts of my day is the time I take to walk. When I got a Fitbit last year as a gift, it spurred me on even more. Here’s the catch: I don’t walk on a treadmill or on a track in the gym.
A Hebrew school teacher is making the rounds in her second grade classroom, inspecting the young students’ High Holiday artwork. Some are drawing shofars, some are drawing apples and honey, some are making cards that say “I’m sorry.”
One of my favorite shul memories from my childhood is going with my Zayde to services on Shabbat morning. He had a regular ritual that during the Haftorah he and his friends would disappear from services into the small kitchen for a l’chaim.
During Tashlikh, we symbolically transfer on to bread crumbs those actions and failings that no longer serve us, just as our ancestors transferred their sins on to the "scape goat" of antiquity. Over the last twenty years or so, this minor custom has seen a major revival in many communities.
Now the real fun starts. We’re going to do some Rosh HaShanah math. Don’t worry, this is fun math. And that’s coming from me, for whom there is no more moronic oxymoron than “fun math.” And since it’s yuntif, I won’t ask you to show your work. Ready? Here we go.
As we prepared for our move to Portland last year, the question nearly every person asked us was “Have you watched Portlandia?” We did actually catch some of the series to see what it was all about, but it’s after having lived here for over a year that the humor in the uniqueness of our city has become perfectly clear.
