The mood of Rosh Hashana traditionally sets the tone for the year. Apples and honey dip the year in sweetness, the round challah sets a circularity, a symmetry, a continuing awareness that midst change and growth and upheaval and pleasure there is a rounding of the edges of time and a circling back to beginnings, that in a realer sense there are no beginnings, only perceived or designated points around the circle. A reminder that each individual's course is not the only measure, because clearly an individual's life does seem to have some clear demarcations: the moment before you take your first walking step, the first step, and so on. First tooth, though like the first step, this is simply a tipping point in a continuum, and the tooth was there from the start. Like new thought, like innovation, like discovery. There from the beginning, just waiting for the right brave, sometimes painful, moment to break through. Even birth itself is a somewhat artificial date, the life before it containing so much musical learning, the rhythms of another's heartbeat, interdependence, protocommunication, (is there any other communication yet?), maybe pleasure. We celebrate the moment of breaking through. And we celebrate the other moments too. Rosh Hashana sets the circular tone of the year, and the paradoxical tone of the year, for it is clearly a beginning.
The mood of Rosh Hashana traditionally sets the tone for the year. Our Rosh Hashana was warm with a certain kind of hug central to Yad Mordecai life, a full, symmetrical hug that lingers a moment longer than hello and welcome, a hug that solidifies family connection and delight in the togetherness. One long table in the big dining hall was all filled with Golda and Moshe's progeny and spice, plus three of Zaidie's clan, Adam, Beno and me. A laughing, tradition-starts-here, warm, somewhat irreverant yet loving welcome to the sweet new year, in a style that was set by Golda and Moshe and their young shtetl friends when they first left Poland and religious dictum and started the kibbutz. Real photoes of Golda and Moshe smile from the dining hall walls. And the presence of so many of our family who have visited that dining hall, with Golda's mosaics on the walls. Also my own 20 year old presence, from the young time I spent in the kibbutz while Beno was in the Sinai just after the Yom Kippur War.
The same synchronicity tales, which seem to one-up one another over the years. Can we ever top Dani and Shlomit's son Lavi, sitting in a restaurant somewhere in India, when his friend commented on the beauty of two young women who walked in, garbed in colourful saris. Lavi looked up, and said, "Those are my cousins, Nadia and Talia". In India.
A fun, lighthearted, delicious, sweet Erev Rosh Hashana, that delights in synchronicity and in circularity, for a fun, lighthearted, delicious, sweet New Year, same as the others only different.
Then on the day of Rosh Hashana I stood by the sea in a windy white sundress with a stone into which I placed everything from the old year that I was ready to bid farewell. Done with ya. Gone. And I tossed it far into the waves. Watched it splash, ripple, and join the sea's bed. And then I picked up the sweetest, pure white scalloped shell, its hite not a white of newness or blankness, its white a white of sun and time and sand and sea and experience. Into the palm of that little open white shell I placed my hopes for the coming year, my promise to myself to accept the pleasure and the surprises with grace and delight and perspective, my awareness that we don't change shape with the wearing away of sea and sun and experience, we just grow more willing to accept and work and produce with what we are. Kept that little white shell, and we went to Jerusalem, where right the moment when I was mentioning our trip to Jerusalem with Mommy and Daddy, my little Smartphone bleeped, and there were Mommy and Daddy on Skype. Oh funny, synchronous world! Oh new, blank, delighting year!