Interfaith Families, on Rosh Hashanah

From On Being Both 

At the Farmer’s Market on Sunday, I bought Jonagold apples to eat with honey, to celebrate the sweetness of the Jewish New Year this week. Then, yesterday, a Washington Post reporter came by to photograph our family with the apples, for a Rosh Hashanah story.

Here on the Mason-Dixon line, at the end of the hottest summer on record, I had to search to find local apples because peach and plum season is just starting to wind down, and apple season is only just beginning. This made me nostalgic for the Rosh Hashanahs of my childhood in New England, when we would go apple-picking as a family right after services every year. My sister and I wore cardigans over our holiday dresses, and the crisp air signaled the ready crop of northern apples–our favorites were McIntoshes and Macouns, both hard to come by in the south.

This time of year, I have often missed the ease of celebrating the Jewish New Year as part of a Jewish congregation. When I was growing up, we belonged to a synagogue, and so we automatically got tickets to services each year. My idea of a proper Reform Jewish service is inevitably based on that lush High Holiday choir of my childhood, salted with hired professionals and led by a brilliant organist, performing the Rosh Hashanah liturgy in sophisticated arrangements.

As an adult interfaith child married to an Episcopalian, raising children with both Judaism and Christianity, I have had to work harder to access Rosh Hashanah. Over the years, we have had backyard celebrations for the “birthday of the world,” including leaving a cake out for the urban critters. We have gone to the local creek with friends for private and impromptu Tashlich rituals, throwing bread into the running water to symbolize casting off all that we did wrong in the past year. Like many families, I took my kids to the free kid services at a local temple until they were really too old for the chaos and simplistic explanations of the holiday. And for many years, I bought expensive tickets to other people’s adult services. Or I flew “home” to celebrate with my parents, in the synagogue of my youth.

Meanwhile, our interfaith community would celebrate Rosh Hashanah a little bit ahead of the actual holiday, in order to encourage families to go to synagogues on the actual date. All of these ways of celebrating have been satisfying, in different ways.

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