Another waltz around the sun is almost upon us. Rosh Hashanah – the Jewish new year – is here. The kick off to the high holiday season, where Jews around the world spend a good chunk of the next month making space for quality time with the fam, and harnessing the power of Jewish ritual to mark moments of meaning and reflection throughout this holy period. 
 
One of the rituals that doesn’t always get the same shine as the others is the practice of Tashlich. Traditionally, folks will launch bread into a local body of water, symbolizing the sins that we are parting ways within the coming year. Why do we associate bread with sin and why is a body of water the chosen receptacle to house our “sin-filled bread”? 
 
Water is elemental, bread is manufactured. Humans cultivate a wheat field, sow the land, thresh, winnow, mill and grind the wheat, knead the dough, ferment it, proof it, shape it and finally bake it. It’s a fallible human process that is vulnerable to circumstance, susceptible to error and a victim of weighted expectations. So too our sins are “bred” from our own doing. As we catapult our sins through the air we return it to the source of life, a basin larger and older than all of us combined, and as the crumb sinks into the depths, it unspools back to its primordial state melting back into the waters that birthed us back when. 

As we enter this holiday season, what are some breads you’ve charred this year (metaphorically or literally) that could use a reset and where is that anchor of home that can help find you the grounding to start again?