‘Soul accounting’ on Rosh Hashanah
Photograph by engin akyurt via Unsplash
Jonah Mac Gelfand
On the afternoon of the first day of Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year), you may see groups of Jews gathered by rivers, lakes, or oceans, tossing breadcrumbs into the water and reciting Biblical verses. This ritual, known as Tashlich, is one of many practices associated with the process of teshuvah.
This season of teshuvah begins with the start of the Jewish month of Elul, which falls in late summer. While often translated as “repentance,” teshuvah more literally means “return.” But what exactly are we returning to?
During this month, Jews attempt to return to a fuller version of ourselves — one where we haven’t harmed each other, ourselves, or the world — and re-focus our attention on acting in holiness and perceiving Divinity in each other and the world. This is a time of making amends, calling up friends and asking for forgiveness for our previous year of misdeeds. We reflect on the year and find the instances where we have fallen short — where we would like to invest time and energy to change in the coming year.
Part and parcel of this process is addressing and repenting for our sins. In Hebrew, the word for sin is chet, which denotes not “guilt” (as does its English counterpart) but rather “missing the mark.” When discussing chet in Judaism, one should picture not a criminal, but rather an archer missing the bullseye. There is nothing inherently wrong with us when we miss the mark. Rather, Judaism recognizes that to be human is to err, and our calendar devotes one month out of the year when we are expected to do some cheshbon ha’nefesh (“soul accounting”) and commit to doing better next year.
In fact, the 20th-century Hasidic mystic Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira (1889-1943) taught that each year we should set specific spiritual and emotional goals for ourselves and ask ourselves what we need to do to actually manifest this ideal version of ourselves. He goes on to say that, if you reach the end of the following year and realize you didn’t live up to those goals, “you will have to accept that you have not really grown because last year’s self will still be hanging around and the newly envisioned version of yourself for this year will not have come to be…”
This standard of introspection that Rabbi Shapira demanded of his students might seem daunting, even unreachable. Yet this sense of urgency — almost life-or-death — is actually a central theme of Rosh Hashanah. According to tradition, it is on this day that the Divine opens the ledgers and determines who will be granted another year of life. In the holiday’s liturgy, we plead: “Remember us for life, King who desires life; and inscribe us in the Book of Life.” But this request is not passive — at its core is the expectation that we engage in honest self-examination, confront our flaws, and commit to bringing more life into the world in the year ahead. Thankfully, the Jewish calendar builds in time and structure to support this process of introspection.
Judaism recognizes that to be human is to err, and our calendar devotes one month out of the year when we are expected to do some cheshbon ha’nefesh (“soul accounting”) and commit to doing better next year.
Tashlich is one of those moments. After a morning spent in synagogue engaged in prayer and introspection, we step into nature and turn our attention outward — toward the world beyond ourselves. It’s a time to acknowledge how our actions impact others and to reflect on the changes we need to make. As we toss breadcrumbs into the water, we symbolically cast away our interpersonal and internal missteps, investing the act with the weight of our transgressions. While doing so, we recite these verses from the prophet Micah:
[God] will take us back in love,
Quashing our iniquities.
You will hurl all our sins
Into the depths of the sea. (Micah 7:19, Revised JPS Tanakh)
Interestingly, it is customary for this ritual to be done in a water source that contains fish. One 19th-century legal compendium explains this by pointing out that since fish don’t have eyelids and their eyes are always open, they arouse the All-Seeing Heavenly Eye’s attention. Therefore, we know our penitence is done in the view of the Holy Blessed One. And as we throw our sins into the water and our own eyes watch them float away, we feel their weight drift off as well.
It is significant to note that this is not a “get out of jail free card” which relinquishes us of our accountability — quite the contrary! This is a season in which we are commanded to sit with our misdeeds. Reckon with them. Take the time to account for how we have acted in the last year.
But then, we must let them go, watch them float away, or sink to the bottom of the pond. It is neither healing for those we have harmed nor productive for our self-development to dwell in the shame of misdeeds. In fact, wallowing centers ourselves rather than the people whom we must ask for forgiveness. The wisdom of tashlich is that just as we need to account for our sins, so too do we need to move on.
But what happens when we can’t seem to forgive ourselves or to trust that the Divine can forgive us? The ancient Talmudic rabbis account for this, teaching that at this time of year the Divine proves Their “abundant kindness” (see Exodus 34:6) by “tilting the scales in favor of kindness” and “pushing down the side that weighs our merits.”[1] It is not just that we must move on — the Divine is also rooting for us, as it were. The Divine sees through any crumbs we have accumulated on our souls over the year(s) and recognizes us for what we inherently are: a pure, holy soul.
And the language of the season teaches this itself! Teshuvah — return — contains within it “re-turn.” We are turning back to a prior state. We can only return to a state of purity and holiness if we’ve been there before. The Divine knows this is our origin, and so leans toward mercy, weighing down the side of merits and guiding us back toward the ideal version of ourselves — the one that Rabbi Shapira insists we must work toward in the coming year.
Jonah Mac Gelfand (he/him) is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Boston. He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Gashmius Magazine, which publishes progressive neo-Hasidic art, poetry, and writing. Before starting rabbinical school, he got his MA in Jewish Studies from the Graduate Theological Union, where his research focused on neo-Hasidic leadership, and his writing has been published in both popular and academic journals.
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of American Baptist Home Mission Societies.
[1] This understanding is informed by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz’s commentary on this section of the Talmud.
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