I didn’t visit my parents at Arlington National Cemetery for the Yamim Nora’im in 2023. I didn’t do TashlichCasting bread upon the water. On Rosh Hashana, Jews traditionally walk to a natural body of water into which they throw breadcrumbs, symbolic of their sins from the previous year. during Rosh HashanahThe Jewish New Year, also considered the Day of Judgment. The period of the High Holidays is a time of introspection and atonement. The holiday is celebrated with the sounding of the shofar, lengthy prayers in synagogue, the eating of apples and honey, and round challah for a sweet and whole year. Tashlikh, casting bread on the water to symbolize the washing away of sins, also takes place on Rosh Hashana.. I visited the old neighborhood and threw pebbles in the creek.
There was a little patch of woods in our neighborhood at the end of the block—the neighborhood where we lived until I was fourteen. There was an outcropping of rock to climb, about ten feet high, that looked to my young eyes like the Rock of Gibraltar. I liked to hang out in these woods, sometimes climbing the rock, sometimes watching the little shallow creek go by, water striders skating on the surface, sometimes watching ants marching through the greenery. It was my quiet place, a place just to be.
When I was small, my dad took me there sometimes to chuck rocks in the water, just to hear the plunk and watch the ripples as the rocks broke through the placid surface. On the second day of Rosh Hashanah, as I dug a few pebbles out of the ground to toss into the creek, I felt transported back to that time of innocence.
The water was very shallow and the current slow then, as it is now. As I gazed into the water I wondered—are those pebbles we tossed a lifetime ago still there on the bottom today?
