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Rocks for Rosh Hashanah: A Rememberance
It is time for us to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year and a glorious new season. Friends have gathered here to perform the tashlikh, an ancient ceremony in which we cast stones into a body of water to symbolize that our sins and misdeeds are removed from us, and that we can begin our new year with a clean slate.
Although I have been ordained I am not, in the conventional sense, a very good Christian. I mess with the traditions too much, I make light of some of the more institutionalized rules. But as much as I am not a very good Christian, I am an even worse Jew—with only a tenuous blood line to make me ethnically legitimate, and a limited knowledge of the intricate practices. This year for the tashlikh, a friend of a friend has come, Erika, someone I‘ve never met before and who is much more legitimately Jewish than I. She‘s from New York. She says the prayers in Hebrew! Knowing this gives me pause, and I make my confession of inadequacy to our new guest. But Erika just laughs. “I‘m not a very good Jew either,” she says, “this last Passover we used a haggadah written by a gay woman rabbi, so a lot of my own people would have disowned me already, too.” We are, both of us, trying to find the connections from our past to our pre-sent, trying to weave together our personal story into so great a Holy story, so grace for one another abounds.
Part of our Rosh Hashanah practice is to symbolically rid ourselves of the regrets, mistakes, and wrong-doings from the past season of our living. To help us do this Fiona has brought us The Litany of Bridges by Heather McVoy, and we read aloud together:
“We who are in exile pray for bridges. We who are torn pray for mending. We who are alone pray for community. We who are in exile pray for bridges.”
We let this yearning build in us during a brief time of reflection. Then, having already donned our wet weather gear, we walked out into the rain and down the street to the grassy fields of Gasworks Park. While we walk we keep our eyes on the ground, stooping from time to time to gather up small stones. The rocks I stuffed in my pockets weighted the corners of my coat and felt hard under my fingertips. I turned them over in my hands until we reached the edge of the lake, the dark water splashing gently beneath us, the rain streaming down on our heads. There we spaced ourselves out along the shoreline, each of us readying to fling our stones into the water.
I held my stones in my hand, and turned my attention toward my six year old daughter, Eden, who was standing next to me. We took turns telling each other what our rocks represented and then tossed each one into the water. She did one. I did one. She did one. I did one. My four stones had sunk well below the waterline as Eden continues to toss in her seemingly endless supplies of pebbles.
“Eden,” I ask, “how many rocks do you have in there?”
“Oh!” she says cheerfully, “ten or twenty!”
Who knew a six year old had so much to regret?
As stood there casting our stones one by one, and away went our misdeeds and our errors, away went our blocks and our regrets, never to be seen again. It’s a surprisingly helpful ritual: the windup, the re-lease, the satisfying plunk of something sinking to where it cannot be retrieved.
Afterwards we walked back across the park through the rain and wind. The hostess in me fretted because of the inclement weather—many folks had refused the umbrellas I‘d proffered, and I worried that they would regret coming out into the wet night. But one friend, Alicia, set me at ease. “I’m glad for the rain,” she explained, “It makes the ritual feel more significant, more important, because we didn’t just stay inside warm and dry. We came out of our comfort zone to make a new start. I like it wet and rainy this way.”
Back at the house we stripped off our wet jackets and thawed our hands around warm mugs. I brought out a chocolate cake with pears and walnuts, the sweet dessert becoming a symbol of hope, and we laid forkful after forkful
