Image: Boaz Yiftach / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

One of my all-time favorite bloggers, Rachel Held Evans, has been learning about Judaism as part of her “Year of Biblical Womanhood” project. Yesterday she posted about Rosh Hashanah (including a yummy challah recipe from a Jewish friend), which peaked my curiosity.

Apparently, Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year, a time when people consider how they’ve lived the last year of their life, think about how they want to live the next year, and prepare for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Traditions include eating apples dipped in honey, to symbolize your desire for a sweet new year, filling your pockets with breadcrumbs and then emptying them into flowing water, symbolically “casting off” your sins, and blowing (or hearing) the shofar.

Now, I’m not Jewish, and I have no desire to disrespect their traditions by pretending to be. But, Rosh Hashanah seems like an incredibly good idea. There’s never a wrong time to think about your life, to consider how you’ve been living, how you want to live, and to make a priority of getting right with God and others. I was also struck by how beautiful the traditions are, and how well they fit into my cultural context. In Northern Wisconsin, the leaves are just beginning to turn. The apples are perfectly ripe. The streams are flowing, the air is crisp and clean, and the warm, yeasty smell of baking bread is wafting out of open kitchen windows.

Perhaps later today I’ll pack a basket with apples and honey, fill my pockets with breadcrumbs, and take my children for a hike down the Amnicon River. Perhaps we’ll talk about forgiveness, about our regrets and our hopes for the future. There may not be a shofar, but there will be a lot of noise and laughter. Perhaps, sandwiched between the past and the future, I will remember that “today” is a holy day, a day to be cherished. A day to savor apples and honey with my children while they are still young, to cast my bread upon the waters and rest in God’s faithfulness.