L'Shana Tova

May you be inscribed (in the Book of Life) for a good year.

Those words are the translation of the Hebrew in the title. Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year and literally means “head of the year.”

The Feast of Trumpets is the first of the fall feasts. It begins on the first day of the seventh month on the Hebrew calendar known as Tishri. It was a holy convocation, a ceremonial Sabbath; no work was to be done.

As the High Holy Days approached, Danny Goldstein, the Post Director in Israel, met with Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz at the Western Wall with a special delivery of letters addressed to God and placed between the stones of the Wall. Every year Israel receives letters in the hundreds addressed to God: “Our Dear Father in Heaven and the Western Wall.” Most of these letters have no return address, and the Israeli Post’s Lost and Found Department sends them to the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Some letters were from within Israel, but some came from Nigeria, France, China, Spain, Russia, Netherlands America, the United Kingdom, and other countries around the world (Gelber, Max 2016).

On Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year), there is a ceremony called Tashlich. Traditionally we go to the ocean (or a stream or river), pray, and then throw bread crumbs onto the water, for the fish can symbolically eat their sins.

Tisha B’Av means the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av and is traditionally a day of fasting to remember the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem.