Tashlich and Transmission

I’m about to go do tashlich with the kids, and I’m not the most excited about it I could possibly be. (it’s a breadcrumb-throwing repentence ritual.)

This is the weirdest Rosh Hashanah of my life. Never been simultaneously so into the time of it and so not into the ritual forms of it.

I appreciate that tashlich is an embodied, enacted nature ritual, and I like the symbolism of stale bread as unfinished business to close out. If I were going by myself, I would probably be excited.

It’s explaining this to little kids I’m not thrilled about.

Obviously the word “sin” will not pass my lips. I think I can articulate an idea that G!d is “with you” while you do this, instead of the image I got as a kid, which was G!d’s pen hovering over the ☠️ column in a ledger, moving incrementally over to the ✅ column with each crumb.

But how to explain that “renew our days as of old” is a perpetual process? That this is possible in every breath? That tashlich is a way of play-acting what that feels like so we can always remember, not the one special day of the year when G!d forgives us?

This is the hardest thing about transmitting Judaism. The forms are designed to stick in the minds of kids. You can’t go to the park and throw crumbs in the river one day a year and then say, “but really, this is a perpetual process,” and expect that to stick.

k time to go do weird stuff in an American public park dressed in all white.