By MARTA HEPLER DRAHOS
TRAVERSE CITY -- Curtis Kuttnauer's new year starts on Sept. 29 this year.
Only instead of wishing friends and family a "Happy New Year," he'll greet them with "L'Shanah Tovah Tikatevu," or "May you be inscribed (in the Book of Life) for a good year."
Instead of fireworks and parties, he'll celebrate with a meal that includes round challah and apples dipped in honey. And instead of making resolutions, he'll reflect on his past deeds and symbolically cast away his sins.
Like a few hundred others in the area, Kuttnauer will observe Rosh Hashana from sundown Monday to sundown Wednesday. The first of the Jewish High Holy Days observed during the first and 10th day of Tishri -- the seventh month of the Jewish calendar -- Rosh Hashana is commonly known as the Jewish New Year. That's not because it's the beginning of the Jewish lunar calendar, but because it's considered the birth of the world, said Rabbi Seth Castleman.
"It's the new year in the sense that mythically it's when the world was created," said Castleman, rabbi of Congregation Ahavat Shalom in Traverse City. "Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur (day 10) has to do with when Moses went on top of Mt. Sinai to receive the Torah. So in terms of the stories and history and lineage, this is the beginning."
Contemplation and introspection
Yom Kippur is the holiest and most somber day of the 10-day period called the "Days of Awe" or "The Ten Days of Repentance" and is marked by fasting, among other things, but Rosh Hashana is full of "peaks and valleys," Castleman said.
"It's quiet and contemplative, but it's also celebratory because it's redemptive," he said.
In fact, the whole month leading up to the high holidays is a month of contemplation and introspection.
"Traditionally the shofar, the ram's horn, would be blown each day and you would hear the ram's horn in waking and preparing oneself spiritually, physically and emotionally for Rosh Hashana," he said. "And one of the ways to prepare oneself is that one makes amends with one's friends and family literally by going to them and asking for forgiveness. God doesn't offer forgiveness until we have made amends with our neighbor."
Castleman said the period is a time of "teshuvah," meaning "return" or "turning."
"It's a time of returning to what's most important; of returning to our deepest sense of self, of returning to our deepest calling, of returning to God, of returning to the mistakes we've made and cleaning them up, which would be the making of amends," he said. "And the making of amends allows us to start fresh with a new beginning in a new year."
Keith Firstenberg is among area Jews who plan to take Tuesday off to attend morning services at his own synagogue, Temple Beth El. Then he'll join members of Ahavat Shalom for a holiday lunch followed by joint services officiated by rabbis of both congregations.
"The difficulty for me, and I'm sure it's similar for everybody, is that I really can't get a holiday for the day," said Firstenberg, a glass scientist working as a ceramics engineer. "I have to take a vacation day."
'Celebrate our religion'
Part-time Traverse City resident Andy Beider will spend the holiday with his family in West Bloomfield, where his three adopted children will get the day off from school. With an estimated 80,000 Jews in the Detroit area, some districts cancel classes on the Jewish holidays because attendance typically falls below 75 percent.
A money manager for the financial firm Smith Barney who often can be seen playing exhibition chess at Traverse City's Friday Night Live, Beider said the family will spend part of the holiday at an "ultra right-wing" orthodox synagogue -- one of four congregations in which it holds membership.
"We want to celebrate our religion wherever we are," he said.
For Firstenberg, who grew up in New York and recalls picking apples at a nearby orchard to dip in honey to usher in a sweet year, getting to spend Rosh Hashana with family back home is a bonus. But it's less important where he observes the holiday than how.
"What I've been discovering over the last few years about my Judaism is that what's important to me is the connection to the past, that the link is to the blessings, the reading from the Torah, the blowing of the shofar," he said. "It's the time with family and the memories of the way you grew up, but for me it's relating it to my grandparents and my great-grandparents and relatives I've never even known from generations ago and saying the same blessing, reading the same passages, finding my own meaning just as they found their meaning."
For many Jews, that meaning often is found in symbolism. For instance, just as the ram's horn is blown on Rosh Hashana as a spiritual "wake-up" call, a round rather than braided challah -- a Jewish egg bread -- is eaten at the holiday to celebrate the beginnings and endings of a new cycle and a new world.
"My wife makes the best challah in the world, but I can't eat it anymore because I'm celiac," Kuttnauer said, referring the disease characterized by intolerance to the gluten found in wheat, barley and rye. "It's tortuous to smell."
Still, a favorite holiday custom involves bread, said the Pathfinder School president and owner of a small executive search firm.
"One of my favorite things is right after the morning service we go to the Boardman River," he said. "You take bread crumbs from your pocket and throw them in. To cast your bread, you cast the things you want to get out of your life."
Other traditions include sending out Jewish New Year's cards and making what Castleman calls the equivalent of New Year's resolutions.
"In my congregation we have done a ritual where people were contemplating what they wanted to accomplish in themselves in the coming year, what they wanted to let go of in themselves in the coming year, what they would like to cultivate in the world in the coming year, and what they would like to free the world of in the coming year," Castleman said.
The rabbi calls Rosh Hashana a cross between Thanksgiving and the secular New Year, with a focus on examining past deeds and asking for forgiveness for sins. While there's a "certain level of gratitude" for arriving in the new year, he said, there's also a "certain trepidation."
"Calling your friends and family, even those you don't have a lot of baggage with, and saying, 'For anything in this past year I've done that hurt you, either knowingly or unknowingly, I ask for your forgiveness' ... As I told my congregation, that's not an easy thing to do," he said. "You can't do it in a mass e-mail. It needs to be personal and it needs to be direct."
