One year ago, Jews around the world welcomed the Hebrew calendar year of 5784, reflected on their actions and sins, and wished for a sweet near year over apple slices draped with honey.
Instead came a brutal attack by Hamas, the Gaza-based terrorist group, on Jews and non-Jews alike in southern Israel on Oct. 7.
The new year turned from sweetness to ash as 1,200 people were murdered and another 250 taken hostage, sparking war, more destruction, and skyrocketing antisemitism.
Now, on the cusp of the new Jewish year of 5785, again come the high holidays and wishes for a sweet year.
But they also mark the one year anniversary of Oct. 7 and the exhausting, persistent reality that followed Hamas’ attack – now mixed with new anxiety over the escalating conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, the terrorist group in Lebanon.
“I don’t think anyone thought that we would still be here, a year later, with 101 hostages still in Gaza, with a war still ongoing,” said Rabbi Rachel Rubenstein, co-rabbi at Temple of Aaron synagogue.
“People had really hoped and prayed that we would, of course, be remembering Oct. 7 [this year], but that we would not necessarily still be in the midst of it.”
For clergy, tending to the anxious and frazzled Jewish community, the upcoming high holidays bring a variety of challenges: How to preserve the spirit of the holidays, and the joy they are supposed to provide, while commemorating horrors and giving Jews room to grieve?
Community members also have a variety of opinions and feelings about how best to celebrate the high holidays this year. It comes with the territory for clergy to accept that, whatever decisions they make, they won’t meet every congregant’s needs.
“We can’t stay in all of the negative feelings,” said Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman, senior rabbi at Temple Israel. In some ways, how much connection to the high holidays “will happen or won’t happen for others [depends] on how much they have been touched personally by Oct. 7.”
Rabbis have a spiritual needle to thread carefully. The Oct. 7 attack has two anniversaries: On the secular date, the Twin Cities Jewish community will gather at an event to mourn together at the Adath Jeshurun Synagogue.
But the Hebrew calendar anniversary of Oct. 7 is on the joint holiday of Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah – considered to be among the most joyful Jewish holidays. Simchat Torah literally means “joy of Torah,” when congregations dance with and celebrate the scrolls at the heart of Jewish life.
This year’s difficult mix of joy and mourning is a familiar one to Jewish tradition. In Jewish history, plenty of dark moments and anniversaries have coincided with holidays.
“We are, defiantly and resiliently, going to be dancing,” on Simchat Torah, said Rubenstein. “We will not stop dancing with the Torah. We will not stop dancing with Israel. And we will particularly have our hearts with the hostages who are in Gaza, and cannot be dancing this year, and we will be dancing for them.”
But Oct. 7 will still permeate: Temple of Aaron will bring in an Israeli musician to perform with a live band on Simchat Torah, and an Israeli scholar in residence during the high holidays to teach about media bias against Israel.
“This is now an inevitable and unavoidable part of how we’re going to be celebrating Simchat Torah this year, and, I believe, into the future,” Rubenstein said.
Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, arrives in just a few days on Oct. 2, with Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, on Oct. 11. The festival of Sukkot begins on Oct. 16, with Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah on Oct. 23 and 24.
Jewish holidays start in the evening after the sun sets.
Congregations adjust ritual, lean into Yom Kippur
At Temple Israel, Zimmerman plans to have an empty table set up to serve as a memorial to the hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza.
The empty table display comes from Hostage Square, a plaza in Tel Aviv renamed by Israeli hostage families to keep attention on their plight. On a mid-September trip to Israel, Zimmerman received a cookbook in Hostage Square that includes favorite recipes of the hostages, which will also feature at Temple Israel.
“We are having a few of those recipes made for us to commemorate and remember the hostages who have died, and also those who we hope will return to the table,” she said.
The Israel trip felt essential for Zimmerman to figure out how to navigate this year’s high holidays. She landed right as the shiva, the initial seven day mourning period, was ending for Hersh Goldberg-Polin, one of the hostages recently found murdered by Hamas.
“I felt like I needed to be [in Israel] in order to speak about it, and I needed to go as close to the high holy days as possible,” she said. “It really was sobering and inspiring.”
Balancing mourning with the spirit of the holidays, especially for children in the synagogue, led Zimmerman to bringing elements of Hostage Square back to Minnesota.
“I think that there’s ways of [celebrating the high holidays this year] that kids can understand, and can actually participate in what that means,” she said.
“That’s why being in Israel was so important. We’re here, we talk about hostages in a very different way than they do,” Zimmerman said. “So I want to honor the hostage families who have put together Hostage Square, and have created these ways of keeping their loved ones’ memories, and their honor, alive.”
Even as Oct. 7 will permeate the entire high holiday season, much of the commemoration will be focused on Yom Kippur.
The Yom Kippur service includes Eleh Ezkereh, or the martyrology, which commemorates rabbis killed by the Romans for their Jewish practice, and the Yizkor, or memorial service, honoring the dead. Those rituals have grown to commemorate Jewish mass murder throughout history.
“The martyrology service begins with the martyrs of the ancient rabbis, goes to the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, all of these historic events,” Rubenstein said.
“This year, quite poignantly, we, along with many other congregations, will be including Oct. 7 in the long line of Jewish history of people who have been murdered and persecuted because they are Jewish,” she said.
“In the same way the Holocaust became part of that service, [Oct. 7] will almost certainly be part of that service for the future,” Rubenstein said.
At the same time, the high holidays will be focused on encouraging Temple of Aaron members to be more involved in Jewish life under the theme of “take one step more.” That’s inspired by an unexpected post-Oct. 7 effect, where more Jews have felt the need to express their Judaism.
“So many people have come to us throughout the last year and said…’I’d never thought I’d be the type of person to want to incorporate Shabbat into life, or to keep kosher, or to have a regular Torah study practice, or to come to synagogue regularly,’” Rubenstein said. It’s “just kind of a grassroots outpouring of desire for connection.”
Zimmerman has also noticed that trend over the past year among Shabbat participants at Temple Israel.
“There’s trepidation, there’s anxiety, and there’s always fear, but what I have found with people who are showing up for Shabbat services is that they might come with hesitancy, but they leave built up with community and prayer – and those are the antidotes to all those other things,” she said.
Simchat Torah tension, meeting the moment
Looming over the high holidays is the strange position of the joint holiday of Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, and how to balance memorializing Oct. 7 with some of the happiest holidays of the Jewish calendar.
Shemini Atzeret, at least, includes another repeat of the Yizkor service to commemorate the dead. But what about reconciling the joyful dancing of Simchat Torah with Oct. 7?
This struggle isn’t new. In the wake of Oct. 7, Israelis debated whether or not to call the Hamas attack, and the ensuing Israel-Hamas war, the Simchat Torah War – and how much weight generally to put on the Hebrew calendar anniversary of the attack.
That’s how the bloody 1973 Yom Kippur war was named, as Arab countries invaded Israel on that holiday. But to many, naming a war and terror attack after Simchat Torah felt inappropriate, and there’s been a conscious choice to stick to remembering the Hamas attack by its secular calendar date.
But for many, the Hebrew calendar anniversary still resonates “at least as much as the secular Oct. 7 date, and we will need to balance the negative resonance of the [many dead] with the positive mitzvot [commandments] of celebrating Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah,” said Rabbi Max Davis, of Darchei Noam.
Previously, for example, Darchei Noam’s celebration of Shemini Atzeret included a barbeque. The event is one of the most popular events at the synagogue each year, drawing up to 120 people.
But this time, Shemini Atzeret will be toned down.
“There’s still a mitzvah to have a kiddish and to celebrate Yom Tov, but the flavor of a barbecue, if you will, is just inappropriate for this year,” Davis said.
“We also want to support Israeli businesses. So we’ll be having Israeli produce and cold cuts, pickles, whatnot, whatever we can find,” he said.
Deciding what to do on Simchat Torah has proven to be more complicated. Davis initially wanted to do one of the dances with the Torah silently, to commemorate Oct. 7. There are traditionally seven dances on Simchat Torah, called hakafot.
But parents pushed back. Simchat Torah is a favorite holiday for families and kids, and they felt a silent Torah dance was overstepping how they were communicating with their children about Oct. 7.
Davis had wanted to “explain [the silent Torah dance] to our youngest children, in a way that will not either bring them down, or complicate the messaging that their parents are trying to give them,” he said. “I’m not sure if it’s possible…we have a lot of young kids, and they don’t need to be casualties to what Hamas did and the ongoing war.”
Otherwise, much like services throughout the last year, the high holidays will include prayers for Israel, the Israel Defense Forces, and peace in the region, and recitations of tehilim, or psalms, for hostages.
One of Darchei Noam’s two Yizkor fundraising appeals will also be raising money for the Minneapolis Jewish Federation’s efforts to help rebuild Kibbutz Holit, which was destroyed on Oct. 7 by Hamas.
“I am going to be looking towards a way that our congregation, as we approach Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, can show love and support to our extended family, our sisters and brothers in Israel, particularly those with an attachment to the community,” Davis said.
Like many other congregations, Darchei Noam’s planning of the high holidays is a work in progress, even in the last few days leading up to the start of the new Jewish year.
“Something like this deserves to be thought and rethought all the way down to the wire,” said Davis. He has been thinking about how to manage this high holiday season since Passover.
“There’s a lot of collaboration happening in our shul, including board members and hearing from congregants, to try to try to get this right,” he said.
