Before the pandemic put a damper on our entertaining, I always looked forward to inviting friends, family and new faculty over for Rosh Hashanah dinner in our Charlottesville, Virginia, home. My favorite part was preparing foods and a fresh text for our Rosh Hashanah seder, a newish custom for Ashkenazi Jews, one with roots in Talmud and generations of practice in Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jewish communities.
Growing up, our Rosh Hashanah dinner featured just a few special foods: the round raisin challah, apple slices dipped in honey, and a new fruit, usually a pomegranate. The extended “seder” we eventually adapted features symbolic foods — simanim in Hebrew — and each food is linked, by its appearance or name, to a different wish for the new year.
On a Rosh Hashanah seder plate you might find the omen foods suggested in the Talmud (BT Keritot 6a): gourd, fenugreek, leeks, beets and dates, foods that “grow and multiply quickly.” The seeds of a pomegranate symbolize fertility and prosperity; a fish’s head is a reference to Deuteronomy 28:13: “God will make you the head, not the tail; you will always be at the top and never at the bottom.”
It’s what anthropologists call an embodied practice: We fully engage in the ritual by speaking words of blessing and eating foods that engage our senses.
Many of the food-and-blessings combos feel just right for a family-friendly gathering, like the apples dipped in honey that look forward to a sweet new year.
But others call out for a creative, non-literal English translation, especially the ones imploring God, in one phrasing or another, to vanquish our enemies. For example, “May it be Your will, God, to cut off all our enemies” is traditionally said over leeks, whose Hebrew name sounds like the Hebrew verb meaning “to cut off.”
Of course I know Jews have had multiple enemies over the course of our history. Terrible ones. But as an American Jew — unlike my Israeli friends — having always lived with a sufficient sense of personal safety and well-being, I have been unlikely to feel anxious about being harmed by enemies. And I am always moved by Bruria, the great woman sage of the Talmud, who chastises her husband Rabbi Meir when he prays for God to smite the wicked people who cause him anguish. Instead, Bruria advises him to pray to God to have mercy on them, so that they will repent. Which is exactly what happens.
So each year I’ve been massaging the anti-enemy blessings paired with the omen foods, because the idea of having enemies or wishing them harm simply seems out of tune with the spirit of the day. And I’m not the only one.
One Reform movement Rosh Hashanah seder text turned the anti-enemy blessing paired with leeks into a wish for our releasing ideas and beliefs that no longer serve us. The traditional date blessing (“May there be an end to our enemies”) becomes instead a hopeful list to end “injustice, apathy, indifference, racism, transphobia and sexism.”
I recall preparing for our Rosh Hashanah seder of 2017, only weeks after violent white supremacists invaded our town carrying Confederate flags and weapons. They stormed past my Charlottesville synagogue that August, calling out “Jews will not replace us!” The Summer of Hate shocked us; racially motivated violence was not supposed to happen in our dear, small American town, not in this day and age. I heard many synagogue friends say, “It felt like Kristallnacht.” How vulnerable the evil and threatening presence made us feel, even after the intruders had left town. Synagogue security went from our remembering to lock the door to the sanctuary after the kiddush luncheon to installing a state-of-the-art system to hiring security guards to protect us.
As unnerving as that summer was, I was not moved, in preparing the texts of our Rosh Hashanah seder for that year, to offer prayers for the demise of our enemies, even those responsible for the death of one local woman, Heather Heyer, and the serious injuries of counter-protesters and bystanders. This sounds touchy-feely, but I was loath to bring in negative energy on this joyous holiday when we are wishing each other happiness, health and sweetness in the new year. Instead, I invited guests to share a vision of how we could do our part to bring healing to our town, with particular attention to tolerating difference, which was a big topic of Charlottesville conversation in the days that followed the summer’s violence.
The first Rosh Hashanah after Oct. 7 is upon us and I still haven’t settled on a Rosh Hashanah seder text that speaks to the circumstances of this moment. I am not without resources. My inbox is filled with suggestions from various rabbinical associations for how traditional holiday liturgies can be shaped or augmented to address the pain of this moment. The Conservative movement, for instance, has posted a document called “Psalms for this Time of Crisis in Israel,” offered as a response to “individual and collective emotions, including grief, fear, rage (even at God), desperation, shock at the incomprehensibility of human evil, faith and doubt, yearning and hope.”
I know this for sure: I can’t keep glossing over the theme of enemies in my text, not after Oct. 7, not when we are days from marking the tragic anniversary when nearly 1,200 people were killed by Hamas terrorists and 250 people who were taken hostage. Israel’s enemies are not vague entities; antisemitism, certainly as we have seen on American college campuses, is palpably real.
And so my omen blessings will be precise: May the people of Israel be safe from enemies who continue to harm them. May our hostages be returned by those who hold them captive. And this year that we pray will be better than the last one, may there be a solution that ends generations of enmity.
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