Jewish New Year begins with a ceremony of renewal

Published 11:18 pm Friday, September 21, 2007

EVERETT — The people stood on the creaking wooden dock, solemnly tossing pieces of bread into the water — but not to feed the crying gulls.

The waves lapped softly against the shore as the members of Temple Beth Or sang, their voices and prayers carrying into the afternoon wind.

The Tashlich service had begun.

Tashlich, which in Hebrew means to “cast off,” is the ancient Jewish tradition practiced on the afternoon of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. The previous year’s sins are symbolically “cast off” by throwing pieces of bread into a large, natural body of flowing water.

“God, we hurl our sins into the depths of the sea,” Rabbi William Cutter said, quoting from the Book of Micah. “We will keep faith with Jacob, loyalty to Abraham, as you promised on the oath to our fathers in days gone by.”

Cutter, a professor from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, led the temple members in meditation on the words of Micah, reminding those assembled that faith needs to be coupled with good works to be complete.

“Participating in religious services requires good works as well,” Cutter said. “All worship is insincere unless you are doing good works.”

Cutter shared a story to a chorus of titters and chuckles about a group of golfers in Los Angeles that practices a unique interpretation of Tashlich.

How? By throwing their bread into a water hazard, of course.

“One of the rules is that it has to be running water, so we come to the ocean,” Cutter said. “We come to the ocean to feel the difference between freshness and stagnation.”

As participants picked up their bread, Cutter asked everyone to dwell on what needed to be forgiven, saying that forgiveness is a mental discipline of remembering, then forgetting. That Tashlich can be seen as a meditation on not only eternity, but on what should be forgotten.

And with that, the bread was flung into the waiting Port Gardner.

“This is an informal meditation, a light thing viewed as a more traditional practice,” Cutter said afterward. “Symbolism, in that raw primitiveness, is a great sophistication. To think and elevate the experience into a metaphor is what makes it more flexible, giving individual symbolism and meaning.”