Dear Congregation Beth Israel members and friends,

While I was away on retreat as part of the Clergy Leadership Program with the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, an email came into my inbox asking why, as a Reform community, we would postpone tashlich (the ritual of throwing bread into a body of water as we pray for help releasing our mis-steps) until the second day of Rosh Hashanah. After the retreat I wrote back and said: that’s my next newsletter column!

There are a few prayers and practices of Rosh Hashanah that most Jews don’t do when the holiday falls on Shabbat. They include 1) blowing shofar, 2) praying Avinu Malkeinu, and 3) tashlich (the ritual of throwing bread into a body of water as we pray for help releasing our mis-steps – in recent years at CBI we’ve done this by blowing bubbles that float away, rather than throwing bread which isn’t great for wild animals.)

So why don’t most Jews do those things on Shabbat – and why as a Reform community are we honoring that restriction? Two great questions. Here are my best answers.

Why does Rosh Hashanah change when it’s on Shabbat?

If someone asked you what the holiest day on the Jewish calendar is, what would you say? Maybe Passover? Maybe Yom Kippur? Actually, the answer is Shabbat. The day of spiritual rest that comes every seventh day all year long is the holiest day on our calendar. Modern culture suggests that something that happens often must be less special than something rare… but Jewishly, Shabbes is the most sacred it gets.

Shabbat is meant to be “a foretaste of the world to come,” a time of deep sweetness. It’s the day when we get an extra portion of soul. It’s also the day when tradition teaches us to live into the “as if” – as if the world were already redeemed; as if there were no more suffering or sorrow or war; as if our world were the Garden of Eden once more. (Halevai, we should be so lucky.) On Shabbat we practice gratitude and contentment.

From this arises our tradition’s deep wisdom that we don’t ask for anything on Shabbes. During the week, the Amidah prayer features 19 blessings, 13 of which are requests for things we don’t have. On Shabbat, that prayer has only 7 blessings (symbolic number!) – we cut out the bakashot, the petitions. We don’t beg or plead on Shabbat. We don’t focus on what we lack. For one day each week, we don’t ask for things from God.

(The one exception is healing: we do pray for healing for those who are ill, even on Shabbat. Maybe I’ll write about that another month.)

This is why most Jews don’t pray Avinu Malkeinu on Shabbat: if you look at

the words

, you’ll see that it is a prayer of desperate pleading. “Answer us! Save us! Spare us from all of these terrible things, God, we’re begging you, please!” is not a “Shabbat vibe.” Even if we love the melody (which I do – both of them – which we’ll sing on day 2 and at Yom Kippur) Avinu Malkeinu is not a prayer of celebration. It’s a cry of yir’ah, awe / fear.

By the same token, the sound of the shofar – broken notes, compared to an alarm (“sleepers, wake from your slumber!” cries Rambam) and also to the sobs and wailing one might cry over one’s beloved dead; an expression of the brokenness of our hearts – doesn’t fit with the sweet sense of sufficiency we seek to cultivate on Shabbat. (As always we will still blow shofar on Erev Rosh Hashanah, before Shabbat begins.)

And Tashlich is centered around feeling the inner impacts of our sins / mistakes / missings-of-the-mark and asking for God’s help in releasing that. Focusing on our sins and feeling regret for where we “blew it” this year isn’t “Shabbesdik.” Tashlich is a ritual of beseeching God and acknowledging our imperfections. It doesn’t align with Shabbat’s “attitude of gratitude,” or with feeling as if our world offers us a taste of Eden again.

There are other reasons for these three prohibitions in other communities. For instance, most Orthodox Jews wouldn’t carry a shofar or tashlich implements on Shabbat. And most Conservative Jews feel bound by halakha, Jewish law (lit. the Jewish “path.”) For me as rabbi in a Reform shul the more relevant reason is cultivating a particular spiritual “flavor” of Shabbat as we celebrate the head of the year and birthday of creation.

Wait, how do Reform Jews decide what customs to follow?

My dad, of blessed memory, used to joke that he loved being a Reform Jew because if you’re a Reform Jew, no one tells you what to do. As long as you pay your synagogue dues, no one cares. You can keep kosher or not, go to shul or don’t: all that matters is that you support the existence of Jewish community! (Thanks, Dad. I miss you, especially at this time of year.) It made me laugh, but he wasn’t entirely wrong.

Being Reform means being thoughtful about which parts of the tradition are meaningful to us. Like our Reconstructionist cousins who say “the past gets a vote but not a veto,” Reform Jews have a variety of practices. For instance, some of us wear a tallit or kippah when we pray, and others don’t. Some of us keep some kind of kosher, and others don’t. Reform Judaism privileges the Jewish value of making informed choices.

Some Reform communities observe two days of Rosh Hashanah, and some observe only one. Among Reform communities that do offer two days of Rosh Hashanah, practices still vary! Some refrain from tashlich / shofar / Avinu Malkeinu on a Shabbat Rosh Hashanah day 1, while others don’t. There is no singular way of “doing Jewish” as Reform Jews. That pluralism is built into what Reform Judaism is, and I love that.

None of these choices are “automatic” for us. As a Reform community, we have latitude to do things in a variety of ways. In recent months I renewed my learning about all of this, consulted with colleagues across the Movement, thought about CBI’s unique history, and thought deeply about what feels spiritually correct to me and what best serves my goals of connecting us with community, with traditions, and with God.

And where I landed is: this year we’ll continue to reserve shofar, Avinu Malkeinu, and tashlich for Rosh Hashanah Day Two. And if that entices you to try Day Two – which has fewer words and less formality than Day One; it’s a much more heimish (“home-like” or informal) service, and shorter too – mah tov, how lovely that would be! (And hey, both days are on a weekend this year… maybe that makes it easier to opt in?)

Wishing all of us blessings in this season of meaning,

— Rabbi Rachel