Shanah tovah - A good year!

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish  New Year, marks the beginning of the Jewish High Holy Days, or Days of Awe. Beginning the evening of Friday Sep. 18 and ending the evening of Sunday Sep. 20, Rosh Hashanah is followed by Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement, beginning on the evening of Sunday Sep. 27 and ending the evening of Monday Sep. 28.

For this issue of the CODI Newsletter, the Center for Interfaith Engagement (CIE) invited members of the EMU community to share reflections on the meaning of these holy days and their faith.

--

“Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are the bookends of Yamim Noraim aka the days of awe, in which we celebrate the beginning of the new year and reflect on our actions in the past one. It is a time of both celebration and reflection, as Rosh Hashanah is both a day of celebration of the creation of humanity or the world (depending on who you ask) and the day of judgment, the sentence of which is sealed on Yom Kippur, the day of repentance. During the days of awe, we are reminded that, in the words of Rabbi Reuven Hammer, ‘we live in a created world, under the sovereignty of a God who cares for us and holds us responsible for our actions.’” 
-- Raviv Monahan (’21 BA, Art and Philosophy)

--

“The Holydays, for me, is primarily a time to stop, notice, truly acknowledge those around me, reflect, and commit to being an actively better person in the year to come. This year is particularly challenging, however, when is a year not full of transgressions that as individuals, we can confront in doing our part to repair the world.”  
-- Michelle Ornstein (President, Beth El Congregation, Harrisonburg, VA)

--

“I have not, for the last thirty years or so, been a very religiously observant Jew.  But I have been and always shall be culturally Jewish.  What I find most important about Rosh Hashanah and all of the major Jewish holidays is most easily expressed in the words of Tevya from Fiddler on the Roof:  Tradition! 

“The tradition I remember most fondly around Jewish holidays were the family meals. Aunts, uncles, cousins, grandmother all gathered for a meal as well as laughter and togetherness.  My mom comes from a big family in Baltimore (average size for some Menno families).  When we got together there were easily 15 to 20 people at a meal.

“As we grew older, it got more difficult to keep the traditional meals going.  People moved away and life interferes. It’s hard to do a three-hour drive to Baltimore in the middle of the week with kids in school and work.

“After my kids were born, we tried to make the family meals, even if it was just my parents and sister and her family.  Every few years, something would work.

“I have fond memories of the traditions of family togetherness that accompanied the Jewish new year.  And I try to instill those in my children.” 
-- William Goldberg (Director, Summer Peacebuilding Institute, Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at EMU)

--

Being Jewish in the Shenandoah Valley 
“Arriving in Harrisonburg, Virginia in 1980 to teach at JMU, I experienced culture shock in terms of my Jewishness.  Having grown up and gone to school in Brooklyn, the New York metropolitan area, Boston, and the D.C. area, I had always been a member of a substantial, highly visible minority.  In the central Shenandoah Valley, we Jews were a tiny minority and almost invisible.  To be assumed to be Christian by virtually every person I met was common.  Occasionally I’d be asked what church I attended.  When I answered that I was Jewish, a surprised “Oh” or uncomfortable silence usually followed.  The effect in those first years in the Valley was to motivate me to seek out Jewish people and culture at Temple Beth El in Harrisonburg.  Observation of Jewish holidays at the Temple and social camaraderie with Harrisonburg’s Jewish community members, many transplants like myself, were very positive experiences and ones that reinforced my Jewish identity in a rural Virginian sea of Christianity. 

“During those first years in Harrisonburg and for the next few decades, I also ran into an unconscious stereotyping of Jewish people by Christian persons and even family members.  (In 1989 I married Dolores Shoup, originally of Orrville, Ohio, and inherited a large, wonderful Mennonite extended family.)  On five or so different occasions, always from the nicest of Christian people, I would hear these noun and verb variants: “cheap as a Jew,” “he Jewed me,” “I was Jewed,” and the like.  And most of these came from my rural Mennonite family members who obviously knew I was Jewish!  The terms had become so ingrained and unconscious that they just popped out spontaneously, without any thought that they might be hurtful to me or part and parcel of dangerous anti-Semitic stereotyping.  I was so stunned on each occasion that I never responded to the individual but subsequently spoke out and wrote letters to the editor and opinion pieces in the local paper whenever anti-Semitism raised its ugly head.  Participating actively in EMU’s Center for Interfaith Engagement is another way I have tried to support Jewish identity and respect for all religions and cultures in our increasingly multicultural Shenandoah Valley.” 
-- Bob Bersson (Visiting Jewish Scholar, Center for Interfaith Engagement at EMU)

Reflection: A Call to Return

By Barbie Fischer (Restorative Justice Practitioner; '12 MA Conflict Transformation)

Holidays are usually a time of celebration; they are also a time of return. Return to one’s extended family, hometown, a return to traditions passed through generations. Yet, the holiday I am speaking of calls us to return to one’s self, Days of Awe, the High Holidays. 

These holidays are known as kicking off with Rosh Hashanah, or as you may call it: the Jewish New Year, and close ten days later with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. These days focus on the Jewish teaching Teshuva (pronounced teh-shoo-vah). Often Teshuva is translated as “repentance,” to turn from one’s sin. Yet, I find that translation to lack the true essence of Teshuva, which actually translates “return” and is taught as a return to our creator and to whom we were created to be. The way to do this is by making amends for the sins we have done.  

This is by far my favorite time of year. Some find it bleak as our Jewish Theology teaches that in order to have eternal life your name must be in The Book of Life and that book is only open for these ten days. If your name is not in it by the end of Yom Kippur, well, you hope to survive another year on earth. For me though, the focus is not on the book, but the author. I have found great peace and come to understand why some call them the Days of Awe. For I am often struck by G-d’s majesty, mercy, and grace as we celebrate the year that has passed and look forward to the New Year with Rosh Hashanah. But to ensure a sweet new year, we must first amend for the shortcomings of the year before. These days call us to reflect on our creator and who we are created to be. 

Who we are and are created to be is often not a simple thing. I was raised in an Anabaptist home and when it comes to being Jewish, my family is far more Anabaptist then Jewish. My parents were both raised as Christians and don’t observe any Jewish traditions. However, at a young age, I became enamored with stories from the Holocaust and reading about the lives of Jews. My father once said that Jesus was a Jew and the Gentiles were grafted into the olive tree, so Judaism is the trunk and roots of Christianity (Romans 11:11-24). Jesus would have followed the Jewish traditions and it was soon after that that my family allowed me to begin observing traditions of our ancestors. It’s not always easy to navigate this Anabaptist-Jewish identity, especially as news in recent years of how the Mennonites have been complicit in the Holocaust, and how there is still so much anti-Judaism in the church and world. After all, we Anabaptists fall in the same trap as other Christian denominations calling it the “Old Testament” rather than the Hebrew Scriptures, allowing for an easy dismissal of the teachings that were the core of the being of the Christian savior, Jesus Christ.  Yet, in these Days of Awe, I always come to find myself thankful for this complex identity I live in. 

As an Anabaptist and more specifically a Mennonite, we are taught Peace, Shalom. Yet, Shalom means far more than what we commonly think of as peace. It is a right relationship with our creator, ourselves, our fellow humans, and creation. It is what Teshuva calls us to. These High Holidays reaffirm the values and faith of both my Jewish and Mennonite heritage. 

As we get ready to enter the High Holidays, I reflect on the past year and am all too struck that we as human kind are as poet Charles Lattimore Howard says, The Awe and the Awful. We see so clearly the capacity for human kind to be horrible to one another, poverty and hunger running rampant, needless killings, fires raging because we did not listen to the native keepers of our land. Yet, we have also seen that the awe of our creator lives within us and we are capable to awe! We have seen this as various generations and nationalities have gathered in a common goal of justice and right relationships. We have seen this in the moments of neighbors helping neighbors. This is what the Days of Awe are about. Where is our awful coming out? How can I show more of the awe I possess moving forward? I look forward to these High Holidays as I ponder these questions, that I may enter a new year that is sweeter than the last. As I return. Return to Shalom. Return to right relationships. Return to who we are and are created to be.