Yom Kippur at Gesher
A SPIRITUAL MEAL BEFORE THE YOM KIPPUR FAST AND YOM KIPPUR SERVICES
Wednesday, October 1 at 4:45 PM - Yom Kippur Evening Spiritual Meal
Wednesday, October 1 at 6:30 PM - Yarzeit (Memorial) Candlelighting and Yom Kippur Candlelighting, Followed by Yom Kippur Service
Thursday, October 2 at 10 AM (continuing throughout most of the day) - Yom Kippur Services
Gesher invites you to join Rabbi Laurie Rutenberg and Rabbi Gary Schoenberg at their home for an intimate Yom Kippur Observance.
The Yom Kippur celebration is especially geared to those who are “newish to Jewish,” but we hope will open the hearts of all, no matter how many rounds of Yom Kippur we have engaged in our lives. The Evening Meal on Monday, October 1st will feature Home Smoked Salmon, Onion Soup, Tzimmes, Kugel, Mushroom Strudel, Salad, and Chocolate Mousse. The Spiritual menu will include deep reflection on the process of renewal, and an opportunity to pen a Teshuvah letter.
Where: Gesher, 10701 SW 25th Avenue - all gatherings will be outdoors, under the trees and stars, weather permitting. Please dress accordingly.
RSVP is a must for both Sunday Evening and Monday Morning. Rabbi Gary and Rabbi Laurie will be preparing the Spiritual Meal. Donations are greatly appreciated.
Ten days after Rosh Hashanah comes Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, a day of making amends. Yom Kippur is a day of offering up confession, of fasting, of praying to God for forgiveness. Like mourners, we traditionally don’t wear leather. Like a dead body, we are traditionally dressed in white. Yom Kippur is a day of facing our own mortality.
Most of all, Yom Kippur is a day of forgiveness and cleansing. In the beautiful glimmer of a new day, celebrated with the replenishment of a break-the-fast meal, there is a wonderful sense of renewal. We have felt the “high” of emerging from deep personal and collective scrutiny, and the celebration of truly beginning again, followed four days later by the joy of Sukkot.
At every service, Jews say the Kaddish, the mourners’ prayer, in memory of their loved ones. During High Holy Days, the loss is brought closer. On Yom Kippur evening, yahrzeit (memorial) candles are lit, and on Yom Kippur day, yizkor (a memorial service) is said. For many secular Jews coming from an experience that is laden with death denial, Kaddish can feel foreign, a little disorienting. Secular America has a hard, hard time addressing mourning as an ongoing process. Americans are more inclined to say a death was a blessing than they are to share the burden of ongoing grief. This creates a distorted effect for Jews who are not used to engaging the memory of the loss of a loved one. It makes Judaism seem like an address of death, not a celebration of life. But take a moment to consider what Kaddish can offer. For some, the desire to say Kaddish is tied to personal loss, and therein the power. For others, after so many millennia of collective losses, after the Holocaust, there is a desire to reflect on more than personal losses. The whole goal of Kaddish is to evoke a yearning in the mourner that all of life be a growing container for the holy and that the experience ofGod be expanded on this Earth. How? Through acts of loving kindness and through righteous action. Even at a time of loss, when death disrupts one’s sense of wholeness? Yes. The underlying premise is that if you are in mourning, you are more deeply aware that time is limited and that life has value. Awareness of limited time can put us in greater touch with life’s sanctity.
This year, we are emphasizing the need for a meal. A sacred meal. It represents a journey, an invitation to look at the world, our world, anew and celebrate.
Planning for the rest of the High Holy Days? Find out about opportunities for Rosh Hashanah here and Sukkot here.
A Further Reflection on Yom Kippur in Our Home
When our children were younger, the evening meal before Erev Yom Kippur glistened in our family home in preparation for services. We only shared this meal with our children, because we wanted it to be intensively personal and to prepare us as a family for the holiness of the day. Each of us parents wrote teshuvah letters to our children and conveyed them. In these letters we put our journey of our past year in view, our child’s journey of growth during the year, the changes, the growth steps, and we recalled the places where we each might have missed the mark, and asked for forgiveness. When our children were very young, we read these letters out loud. As they became older, we gave them to our children and they read them before the meal and thanked us in a loving manner. We each gave our forgiveness and it engendered a spiritual opportunity to really begin again. As a family, we were fortified with gratitude and well-being, and we prepared a meal that prepared us spiritually for the holiday. We lit yahrzeit candles, not the holiday candles, which we would light together later with the community. We served a meal: fish, soup, salad, and we always ended this meal with chocolate mousse.
This year, we are pondering Erev Yom Kippur in the context of both blessing and challenge in our world. We are savoring the experience of a community having come together on Rosh Hashanah. Though we put out the word barely a week before, our deck was filled with people joyous to be here, and we spent the evening, eating, reflecting, listening to music, looking up at the stars from beneath the trees, and praying. This year’s Rosh Hashanah, too, glistened.
We definitely appreciated each and everyone one who joined us on Rosh Hashanah. We shared deeply life’s journey and shared blessings. Now, we confront the weight of Yom Kippur and wonder if you would like to join us. Because of its intensity, it’s not for everyone. Especially Jews who don’t have nourishment and joy in their lives. After all, Yom Kippur is a fast day and it presents a demand spiritually that fits in the journey of the year, but isn’t really designed for the incidental traveler. On the other hand, if you’d like to join us for Yom Kippur, we are offering a spiritual meal before the fast, modeled on our family’s experience. No, you don’t have to be fasting to join in. It will have glimmers of our family meal, and the menu will be simple: Fresh Smoked Salmon, Salad, Soup, Kugel, Strudel, Tzimmes, and Chocolate Mousse. We will only do this if we have a minyan (ten) for services, but we’re pretty confident, at this point, that we will. We will have services on Monday with the same proviso, that we have a minimum of ten, so we are asking for commitments.
Yom Kippur is a special journey. The fast mixes with a yearning to confront our time on this Earth in a different light. There is confession, prayer, and the light of the day is more amber than white. The customary dress is white. And the journey of the day has a certain bleariness (from fasting and repeated confession) to the day that allows for a deeper reflection and a spiritual opportunity for true renewal and replenishment. As the day progresses and the body wearies, the bleariness increases and there is the opportunity to lapse into a deeper sense that this is our collective opportunity to be renewed, to explore traditional and contemporary prayers at a pace that will allow for conversation of the heart, and the opportunity to be still with your soul in the forest while in community with others on the same spiritual journey.