Rosh Hashanah 2024: A Journey of Resilience

Exactly 60 years ago my family celebrated our first Rosh Hashanah in America. We were all so young!  Thanks to JIMENA: Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, for asking me to recreate the feeling of that first Seder Yehi Ratson, the Sephardi custom of bringing in the new year with symbolic foods and blessings, and to expand it to embrace the concept of resilience through ritual. The article has just been published in JIMENA's quarterly journal, Distinctions.

I’m especially touched by the beautiful collage art director Neomi Rapoport crafted from the photos I shared with her. I hope you find a few minutes to read the article amidst your preparations. It’s especially appropriate for this Rosh Hashanah.

It's an understatement to say that the world has changed in the past year. October 7 threw our assumptions and our sense of safety into chaos. It turned the unimaginable into reality. Now,  we are faced with how we can possibly articulate wishes that would reflect our hopes for the new year.

The Sephardi custom of holding a short seder on the first night of Rosh Hashanah, the Seder Yehi Ratson (“May it be God’s will”), guides us to find our voices. The home-based ritual asks God to keep evil and enmity far away from us and to provide us with strength, abundance and peace. Apples, pomegranates, dates, beans, pumpkin, beetroot or spinach leaves, and chives turn into our wishes for a year full of sweetness, good deeds, prosperity, happiness, freedom and friendship. Traditionally, the seder concludes with the head of a fish or sheep (savory sweetbreads), for the wish that we should be heads and not tails, leaders, not stragglers. (I suggest a head of lettuce.) By ingesting these foods, we participate in the process of birth and growth inherent in nature, investing Rosh Hashanah with even more power as the birthday of the world.

A series of biblical verses with mystical meanings precedes the foods and their blessings. It ends with three small words: Tahel Shanah u'virkhoteha. May the new year begin with its blessings.

These three words are taken from a long piyyut, a liturgical poem called Ahot Ketanah that introduces the Rosh Hashanah evening service on the first night. Written by Abraham Hazan Girondi, it refers to Israel as a young daughter who prays to God to heal her sorrows. In the original, each of its many verses ends “Tikhleh shanah v’kileloteha,” may the year end with all its curses. Only the last verse ends, “Tahel shanah uvirkhoteha.” Whatever evils have challenged us in the past year, the new year is wrapped in blessing from its very start. We turn curses into blessings.

The seder yehi ratson is just one of many rituals—both Sephardi and Ashkenazi—that embody the concept of resilience. Whether the rituals teach resilience, or our resilience throughout centuries empowers the rituals—that’s up for debate.

Perhaps both coexist.

Tizkoo l'shanim rabot!
May you merit many years.