printSeptember 12, 2008
A Sense Of The Holidays
Executive editor Phil Jacobs reflects on ways to make the High Holidays meaningful.
Phil Jacobs
Sometimes the mere mention of the words “High Holidays” can bring about a feeling of pressure.
It starts as a distant thought at the beginning of the summer. At about the time we’re seeing school supplies on the store shelves, we know that it’s not going to be too long before we’re back into the cycle of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot and Simchat Torah.
I say “pressure” because there’s this pressure to get something out of the holidays, some sort of spiritual lift or divine inspiration. It’s kind of like feeling the pressure to relax and have a good time during the one week you load up the minivan, stop the mail, stop the paper, take the dog to the kennel and agonize over which light to leave on in the house while you and the kids go the beach and have “fun.”
Fun can mean sand in places you never knew sand could go. It could mean taking your youngest to the bathroom not five minutes after leaving the house, and then sitting in traffic listening to kids’ tapes or DVDs over and over and over again.
Jewish holidays don’t have to be such an emotional hurdle. They should offer something that the children can take with them through their lives. That something doesn’t have to be so complicated.
It could be mom or dad getting a simple honey cake recipe and making a cake with their children; or how about actually making a challah together?
If you’d check with my 25-year-old daughter, she’ll tell you about the time when, as a five-year-old, she and her friends and our friends built our first sukkah together. The little children took every available can of old paint we could find in our collective basements, poured them into one or two cans and produced a color that looked as if brown had been somehow accented with purple. The kids took paint brushes and painted the wooden planks we used as walls.
Then, while we adults worked on sawing and fastening, the kids made colorful paper chains out of construction paper. The mini-kids (ages three and under) finger-painted artwork for the walls.
I just remember it all being capped off by a Sukkah evening meal. We had a steamy soup that warmed us, but most of all we had our children sitting in a sukkah looking up at the starry sky.
These are the kinds of memories that our children will share with their children one day, and it’s really the glue, more so than the tickets, the clothes, the rush to shul, that becomes part of the fabric of a child’s connection to Judaism.
Let them taste Rosh Hashanah by eating a piece of apple dipped in honey.
Let them hear the shofar blasts. But don’t make the shofar so foreign, so far away. Let them touch the ram’s horn and try to make sounds themselves.
Dance with them on Simchat Torah and bring them up to a Torah so that they can see it and touch it.
Put an essrog up to their noses so they can smell that unforgettable citrus aroma, and let them shake a lulav up and down, side-to-side.
Again, our children need to come back as adolescents, teens and young adults to the upcoming Jewish holidays with a reminder that something, some experience, happened that brought their senses alive. We can give them that feeling so that they can taste, smell, hear and touch these holidays.
As parents, uncles, aunts and grandparents, it’s up to us to give that over to them.
What are we waiting for.
Have a sweet Rosh Hashanah.