Tashlich is a High Holiday tradition with a storied history. On the first day of Rosh Hashanah — the first day of the Jewish New Year — people gather together near a body of water to recite prayers. Some people have the custom to throw bread crumbs into the water in a symbolic gesture of casting their sins away.
There’s no one-size-fits-all way to take part in tashlich. The Talmud speaks of people weaving baskets, filling them with produce and sending them into the water, with each basket representing a child. Some Jews from the Kurdistan region even throw themselves into the water to purify their bodies.
While some rabbis were once against the concept of tashlich, stating that it was idolatry and that food thrown into the water could be eaten by fish, and feeding animals is forbidden on Shabbat, tashlich is widely accepted today, though it’s not practiced in every Jewish community.
But congregations around the world, including in the Baltimore area, have been flipping this tradition on its head — doing good for their community and repenting by taking things out of the water instead of putting them in.
Started by the nonprofit environmentalist organization Tikkun HaYam — meaning Repair the Sea — in 2018, the newer custom of reverse tashlich sees participants taking part in clean-up efforts at their local lakes, rivers and other waterways.
“I first participated in tashlich in my early teens,” recalled Ellen Weiss, one of the co-chairs of Chizuk Amuno Sisterhood’s local reverse tashlich event. “We would walk down a main road to a pond. The cantor led us in song and prayers. What resonated with me is that I was part of a community.”
In addition to congregations across the United States and in Israel, some of the other participating congregations and community organizations clean up areas all over the world, including Ukraine, Thailand, Uganda and New Zealand.
Repair the Sea’s yearly review estimates that 2023’s reverse tashlich efforts resulted in a cumulative 23,274 pounds of trash and other debris being removed from the water, with over 4,000 volunteers in 23 countries contributing.
“I wrote my master’s thesis on Jewish intentional sustainable communities, so for me, reverse tashlich is the culmination of all of the things that I am, and a vision for how we as a community in the Baltimore Inner Harbor need to interact with our natural environment,” said Beth Vander Stoep, a community organizer who is leading the Downtown Baltimore effort during this year’s reverse tashlich. Vander Stoep is a board member at B’nai Israel: The Downtown Synagogue, but her coalition is designated as the broader “Downtown Baltimore” because she hopes to engage Jewish Baltimoreans from outside of the synagogue.
This group is planning to focus on the Inner Harbor, along with a few estuary points that feed into it. The Baltimore Harbor has been the site of significant clean-up efforts over the past decade, even being marked safe for swimming in early June.
Vander Stoep added that the Harbor has deep historical significance — though this significance has not always been positive.
“Many enslaved people were forcefully crossed into the Inner Harbor. The [Reginald F.] Lewis Museum used to be the site of a slave market. There’s a real, visceral trauma to this particular place,” she said. “I know for a fact that a garbage cleanup is not really going to make an impact on that legacy of pain and suffering … but it’s one small thing. I think that we live in such a broken world that if we can all do these small acts of making the world a better place, those small acts will lead into really great things.”
Some of the other local participants include Columbia Jewish Congregation, University of Maryland Hillel of College Park and the Chizuk Amuno Sisterhood, which is holding an event in coordination with the synagogue’s Gemilut Hasadim volunteer program. They were first introduced to the idea of reverse tashlich by the Women’s League for Conservative Judaism, which featured the custom in their newsletter a few years ago.
In the past, the Sisterhood volunteers have cleaned up trash on the shore of Middle Branch Park. This year, they’re focusing their efforts on Ferry Bar Park, because the waterways at Middle Branch Park are often inaccessible due to erosion.
“We read about the damage plastics and other trash in our waterways can cause. Even on a remote beach in the Galapagos, I found plastics washed up on the shore,” said Wendy Davis, the other event co-chair. “It is an overwhelming problem, but if each of us plays a role in the cleanup, it hopefully will make a difference in our environment.”
