Rosh Hashanah Begins High Holy Days For Jewish Faith
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There is a duality to Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year that begins Friday, said Rabbi Joshua Lief of Wheeling’s Temple Shalom.
“Rosh Hashanah itself is about holding two contrary ideas in our mind at the same time,” he said. “We look both backward and ahead. We celebrate and repent. We root ourselves in the past, but we keep striving to move forward.”
That looking ahead is a crucial aspect to the holiday, Lief said. Translated from Hebrew, Rosh Hashanah means “head of the year,” the start of the coming year on the Jewish calendar. It is a celebration that begins at sunset Friday and lasts until nightfall Sunday.
“As we come around the calendar every year in the fall, it’s time for Rosh Hashanah again,” he said, “but we aren’t just going around in a circle. We’re spiraling forward through time. We’re in a different place this year than we were last year, or the year before, or the year before that.
“We keep moving forward,” he added. “Time inexorably moves us forward, whether we like it or not.”
Temple Shalom’s Rosh Hashanah service will begin at 8 p.m. Friday. It will include the start of the synagogue’s High Holy Days food drive, where congregants collect food or donate money for those in need. Everything collected will then go to Catholic Charities. After Friday’s service will be a reception sponsored by the Temple’s sisterhood.
The celebration continues Saturday with a 9:30 a.m. children’s service and a main congregational service at 10:30 a.m. After the main service, the congregation will participate in the ritual of Tashlich, where people symbolically cast away their sins into a natural body of water. Temple Shalom congregants will walk down the street from the synagogue to the Long Run stream, take small pieces of bread and cast them into the water.
“It’s a reminder to ourselves of the things we need to work on in the new year, right here at the beginning,” Lief said. “We commit ourselves to trying to do better.”
Rosh Hashanah begins the Jewish faith’s High Holy Days, which conclude with Yom Kippur, the day of atonement that begins at sunset Sept. 20. In between are the faith’s Ten Days of Repentance.
“We are celebrating, but we’re also repenting and asking for forgiveness at the same time,” Lief said. “The two are very much hand in hand. It’s a wonderful opportunity for taking a spiritual inventory. Rarely do we take time for personal analysis. We always talk a big game about personal growth, but how is that possible if we don’t measure how far we’ve come already? How could we know how far we still have to go?”