Written by Liat O., Co-Founder & Executive Director, Building Community Thru Conversation (BCTC)
Shanah Tovah and Chag Sameach to our Jewish community. And to everyone else, here is a little window into what this season can mean religiously, culturally, historically, and as part of the story of a people.
Let me take you on a little journey through who we are, what we celebrate, why we celebrate it, and what these traditions can tell you about us.
🧭 Where This Story Will Take Us
This is first and foremost a holiday story about wishes for a sweet year, family tables, foods, traditions, forgiveness, gathering and beginning again. But our traditions also carry our history. Along the way, there are a few places where the story becomes heavier, including why a people might have holiday wishes about enemies disappearing, why Jews moved from one country to another so often, and why Simchat Torah now carries an additional painful meaning after October 7.
⚠️ Those portions are clearly marked. You can read the lighter holiday story without going deeper, or continue into those sections if you want to understand more of the history behind it.
In this story:
🍎 Rosh Hashanah & peoplehood: what being Jewish can mean beyond religion
🍯 The holiday table: sweetness, simanim and symbolic wishes
🗺️ How traditions traveled with us: migration, assimilation and continuity
🙏 Yom Kippur: accountability, forgiveness and repair
⛺ Sukkot: gathering, hospitality and temporary homes
📜 Simchat Torah: completing the cycle and a difficult new layer since October 7
👥 Another Year of Being Here: what all of this means to me
🤝 Take Action: one very simple way to connect
🍎 A New Year, But Not Quite the Way You Think
Rosh Hashanah means “head of the year.” It is the Jewish New Year, although the Jewish calendar is a little more complicated than that. The Jewish calendar follows its own ancient rhythm, which is why our holidays move around on the Gregorian calendar and begin at sunset. If you are wondering why our “New Year” actually begins in the seventh Jewish month, there is more about that below.*
Rosh Hashanah marks the beginning of a season of holidays filled with reflection, forgiveness, gathering, tradition and celebration. For many, it also carries profound religious meaning: judgment, prayer, the sounding of the shofar, reflection on the year that passed and preparation for Yom Kippur. But that is not the only way Jewish people experience it.
For many Jews who are secular, traditional, cultural, Israeli, somewhere in between, or even atheist, yes, that is totally a thing, these holidays are also about something that can be harder to translate: peoplehood. You can be Jewish and not believe in God because being Jewish is not defined only by belief. It can also be your family, history, culture, traditions and belonging to a people. It is not simply something you believe. It is also something you inherit through family, history and collective memory. Some people describe that feeling by saying, “It’s in our DNA.” They may mean the traditions, stories, instincts and sense of belonging passed down through generations. In a literal biological sense, many Jewish people also carry genetic traces of ancestry reaching back through ancient Jewish communities. In Hebrew we say Am Yisrael, the People of Israel.
Judaism includes a religion, but Jews cannot be understood only as members of a religion. We are a people with a shared history and collective memory, traditions, languages, cultures and an ancient connection to the land of Israel. Within that people are Jews who are deeply religious, Jews who do not believe in God, and almost every possibility in between.
That is important to understanding why some Jewish people belong to or enter a synagogue often, some occasionally, some rarely, and some may come only to celebrate or pay respect, and all can still feel profoundly Jewish. The traditions themselves vary tremendously from one family to another, shaped by family history, origin, culture and what was passed down from one generation to the next.
💡 THE BOTTOM LINE
Being Jewish can include religion, but Jewish identity is not limited to religion. For many of us it is also family, history, culture, tradition, ancestry, collective memory and belonging to Am Yisrael, the Jewish people.
🍯 The Story as It Is Displayed on the Table
Rosh Hashanah may be one of the easiest places to see it. We wish each other Shanah Tovah U’Metukah, a good and sweet year, and much of what we put on the table carries a wish with it.
🍎🍯 Apples and honey represent the sweetness we hope for in the year ahead. 🐟 Some families put a fish or another head on the table and wish that we will be “the head and not the tail.” There are also simanim, symbolic foods often connected through wordplay to what we hope the coming year will bring. Selek, beets or chard, is connected to the hope that those who wish us harm will be removed. Karti, leeks, carries a wish that our enemies will be cut off. Dates, gourds, pomegranates, carrots and other foods carry different meanings and traditions. Many of these wishes also tell a story of resilience and survival, especially for a people who have repeatedly had enemies and still continued.
But not every family does all of this, and not every family uses the same simanim. Different foods have different symbolic associations in different Jewish communities. What is on the table can change slightly or dramatically from one family and one place of origin to another. More examples of the simanim and their wordplay are included below.**
💡 THE BOTTOM LINE
Ask ten Jewish families what they eat for Rosh Hashanah and you may get ten different answers. That is part of our story too. We are incredibly diverse in traditions, habits, origins, beliefs and definitely opinions.
⚠️ A Deeper Layer: Why Are We Talking About Enemies at a Holiday Table?
The next section briefly discusses Jew hatred, persecution and violence against Jews. By Jew hatred, I mean antisemitism, anti-Judaism and anti-Zionism when it crosses into hatred of Jews as Jews, as well as rhetoric or actions that call for discrimination, slurs, exclusion, dehumanization, violence or harm against Jews in general. If you want to stay with the lighter holiday story, you can continue at “We Moved, and the Traditions Moved With Us.”
Some of these wishes about enemies may sound surprisingly blunt to modern ears, but they also tell part of our history. It is part of why we became so often navadim, wanderers, moving from one place to another. For a people that repeatedly experienced persecution, expulsion and violence, wishing at the beginning of another year that those seeking your destruction, or the destruction of your people, would not succeed was never entirely theoretical.
Those people existed. They still exist, and sadly they will continue to exist. Jew hatred can be seen on social media, in the news and sometimes on the street next to us through protests, events, graffiti and vandalism, and, at its worst, through threats, attacks and killings. Hatred of Jews has repeatedly found a place in very different periods, cultures and political movements. A very small minority can become a convenient scapegoat, blamed for whatever a society at a particular moment needs someone to blame.
New and ancient accusations adapt to whatever is happening at the time. Jews have been scapegoated for centuries, blamed for disease, economic hardship, political unrest, war, social change and whatever else a society needed someone to blame. Jews can again become collectively blamed, targeted by slurs and slogans, or confronted with versions of new and ancient blood libels in modern language. The language changes with the time, but the pattern can remain surprisingly familiar.
If you do not recognize it or cannot see it, there are resources that can help. Understanding Jew hatred means learning what it has looked like across history, how it has changed its language in different political and religious environments, and how to distinguish legitimate disagreement or criticism from the demonization, collective blame, exclusion or targeting of Jews. I have included several places to start in the notes below.***
And yet, after all of that history, we sit down, dip an apple 🍎 into honey 🍯 and wish one another a sweet year.
🗺️ We Moved, and the Traditions Moved With Us
Jews began as a people in the land of Israel, but over thousands of years Jewish communities spread across the world. Sometimes Jews moved for the same reasons people have always moved: trade, education, opportunity or the hope of building a more prosperous life. Other times, the reason was much darker. Jews moved because where they were was no longer safe because they were Jews. They were persecuted, expelled, displaced or subjected to violence. Sometimes moving was simply about finding somewhere they could live and survive.
Then we settled somewhere else and adapted. We assimilated. We learned new languages, adopted local ingredients and customs, and became Moroccan Jews, Polish Jews, Iraqi Jews, Yemenite Jews, Ethiopian Jews, French Jews, American Jews and many more communities. Our traditions changed with us.
Living in America, I am learning more every year that American Jewry has developed its own culture too, its own way of being Jewish. That became particularly clear to me recently when I was looking for a Rosh Hashanah book to read to my son’s class. I kept looking for a story that showed what I was trying to share with the children: the family, the table, the simanim, the connection to Israel and where we came from, and the sense of belonging to a people.
I found many beautiful books about prayers, God, synagogue and particular religious traditions and dress. Those are absolutely part of Judaism. I was also reluctant to bring a book into the classroom that centered mainly on religion or belief in God. We have to be inclusive and sensitive to other children, cultures and beliefs, and I did not want sharing our story to feel like we were forcing any beliefs onto anyone else. But that is another story. I am trying to share with his classmates and friends who spend time with him a little about our story, or at least my lens on our story.
So I struggled to find the Jewishness I wanted to explain. The house may look different. The food will certainly look different. The stories may emphasize different things. But underneath them are pieces of a shared story.
We assimilated into the places where we lived to different degrees, and some Jewish communities flourished in those places for centuries. And somehow, we also kept pieces of ourselves. For some, because our grandparents did it, and their grandparents did it. For others, because it is written in the Bible and they believe in God. And for others, because they may not believe in God at all but cannot imagine the year without that family table, its traditions and everything those traditions signify.
For many of us, that continuity itself is sacred.
Families like mine carry histories of migration and persecution, including relatives who were lost simply because they were Jews, during the Holocaust and much before that through the Inquisition and other recurring periods of persecution, expulsion and violence throughout history. These are not isolated moments. Their impact continues through family memory and Jewish collective memory today. But we also carry the stories of those who moved, survived, rebuilt families and continued.
So when a secular Jewish family gathers for Rosh Hashanah, it may not feel like performing a religious obligation at all. It may simply mean:
“This is what our family does. This is where we came from. This is part of who we are. And we are still here.”
🙏 From Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur: Saying Selicha
Rosh Hashanah is only the beginning of this stretch of Jewish holidays. Ten days later comes Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Traditionally, Jews fast for about 25 hours. It is a day of introspection, accountability and asking selicha, forgiveness. Here too, Jews observe differently. Some spend much of the day in synagogue and observe the traditional fast fully. For traditionally observant Jews, Yom Kippur includes fasting and setting aside everyday comforts to focus on prayer, reflection, repentance and repairing relationships. Others may fast only from food and drink. People who cannot safely fast are not expected to endanger their health. Some attend services but do not fast, and some do not fast at all.
In Jewish tradition, God is sometimes called HaMakom, “the Place.” We ask forgiveness from God, but there is an important distinction when the harm is between one person and another. Prayer cannot substitute for repairing that harm. We need to go to the person we hurt, acknowledge what we did and ask for forgiveness. And asking for forgiveness does not automatically create an obligation for the other person to erase the hurt.
The fact that we have a day dedicated to forgiveness does not give us permission to cause harm and then expect it all to disappear. We should try to avoid hurting others in the first place. But we are human, we make mistakes, and when we do, we need to own them.
⛺ Then Comes Sukkot
Then comes Sukkot. For a week, Jews build temporary structures called sukkot and eat, gather and sometimes sleep inside them. The holiday connects us to the biblical journey through the wilderness and to the agricultural cycle of the land of Israel.
For Jews, calling something “biblical” does not necessarily mean experiencing it only as a religious belief. The Bible is also part of Jewish history, literature and collective memory. Its places, peoples and societies are connected to the ancient world through historical and archaeological evidence.
We also have the Four Species, lulav, hadas, aravah and etrog: like 🌴 palm, 🌿 myrtle, 🌱 willow and 🍋 citron. It is a holiday of gathering and hospitality. We build a sukkah, invite people into ours, visit someone else’s, sit together, eat and celebrate.
📜 Simchat Torah: Ending and Beginning Again
And then comes Simchat Torah, when the annual cycle of reading the Torah is completed and begins again. For Jews who are religious, Torah is naturally at the center of this celebration. For others, it may simply be part of the holiday season we grew up with.
Since October 7, 2023, that holiday also carries another meaning for many Israelis and Jews around the world. October 7 happened at the end of this holiday season, when families were gathered at home and young people were also celebrating at a music festival. More about what happened is included below for those who want to read it.****
For those families, for the people of Israel, and for many across Am Yisrael, the wider Jewish peoplehood, this was not a distant battlefield that suddenly reached them. Violence and massacre entered homes, communities and a holiday. That memory now sits alongside a celebration that existed long before it.
It is not the whole story of these holidays. It should not be. But it has become part of the story, and for many Jews Simchat Torah and October 7 are now forever wrapped around one another.
👥 Another Year of Being Here
There are roughly 15 million Jews in a world of billions. We are a very small people. And yet Jewish communities have carried an identity across thousands of years, countries, expulsions, migrations, persecution, assimilation and enormous cultural change. Not unchanged. Not with one opinion. And certainly not all practicing Judaism in the same way.
But still here.
That is one way to understand why these holidays matter even to Jews who do not experience them primarily through religion. They can be a celebration of existence. Another year of being Jewish. Another year of gathering around a table. Another year of teaching our children something our parents taught us. Another year of being together with family, or with friends who become family when we live thousands of miles away from our own. Another year of being ALIVE.
Another year of perhaps adding foods from the country where we now live while somehow keeping a recipe that traveled from somewhere else. Another year of saying: May it be sweet. May we live safely. May we prosper. May those who seek to harm us not succeed. May we be the head and not the tail.
And importantly, our survival does not require diminishing anyone else’s existence. Celebrating our people does not require diminishing another people. We can celebrate being alive among others, not instead of others.
💡 THE BOTTOM LINE
For many of us, these holidays are not only about religion. They are another year of being here, another year of remembering where we came from, another year of passing something forward, and another year of celebrating life.
A Little of My Own Table
This is the lens through which I, as an Israeli and a Jew living in America, understand these holidays. I grew up celebrating them as part of life, family and who we are, even when religion itself was not necessarily at the center.
Ask me what was served at our Rosh Hashanah table growing up, and I can tell you. Ask me what is being served now, thousands of miles away at my family’s tables in Israel, tables I wish I could join, and I can probably tell you that too.
There will be discussions about who is hosting and who is bringing what because, although the host makes most of the meal, everyone brings something. There will also be the annual question of gifts. I think at some point we decided to stop buying them because after so many years we had exhausted ourselves trying to figure out what else to bring, and the gifts were always a little hit or miss anyway.
That is Rosh Hashanah too. Not only the synagogue. Not only the prayer book. The crowded table, the dishes everyone was assigned to bring, the familiar food, the arguments, the jokes, the family members you miss, and the traditions you repeat without always remembering when they started.
🤝 Take Action: Say Happy New Year and Hear Our Stories
This Rosh Hashanah, there is a very small way to show support and be a real partner or ally: wish your Jewish friend, neighbor, colleague or classmate a Happy New Year. “Happy Rosh Hashanah” is perfect. Or try “Shanah Tovah.”
But if you can, BCTC is asking you to go one step beyond knowing the right greeting. Take a moment to listen with curiosity and learn. Read this perspective, but then ask the Jewish people in your own life what the holiday means to them. Maybe it is about God and prayer. Maybe it is about family. Maybe it is about Israel. Maybe it is their grandmother’s food. Maybe it is about reflection. Maybe it is simply a tradition they have practiced their entire life without ever stopping to define why.
And to our Jewish readers, what does Rosh Hashanah mean to you? This is one lens. It shows part of our story, but there are many other angles shaped by different families, origins, beliefs and experiences. Please check the post on the website, Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn, leave a comment and add yours. Tell us what feels familiar, what is completely different in your family, and what this holiday means in your home.
🍎🍯 Shanah Tovah U’Metukah. May this be a good and sweet year. May there be no polarization, no division, no extremism and no hate. Or at least, a little less of each and every one of them.
📚 A Little More for Those Who Want to Go Deeper
*Why Does the Jewish New Year Start Now?
The Jewish calendar can be confusing because Rosh Hashanah is the New Year, but Tishrei is actually called the seventh month when the months are counted from Nisan, the spring month of Passover. Jewish tradition has more than one “new year” for different purposes. Rosh Hashanah, on the first of Tishrei, became the beginning of the year for counting years and is traditionally associated with the creation of humanity. The timing also sits within the ancient agricultural cycle of the land of Israel, at the turning and gathering in of the year.
So when we say “Happy New Year,” there is a lot of history packed into those three words.
**A Few More Rosh Hashanah Food Symbols
The simanim differ among Jewish communities, and some traditions developed through wordplay in Hebrew, Aramaic, Yiddish and other languages.
🍎 Apple and honey: a sweet year.
🐟 A head: may we be the head and not the tail.
🥬 Leek, karti: connected to a word meaning “cut off,” traditionally referring to enemies.
🥬 Beet or chard, silka/selek: connected with the hope that enemies will disappear or be removed.
🥕 Carrot: in Yiddish speaking traditions, merren evokes multiplying or increasing. In a Hebrew association, gezer can evoke a decree and the hope for a favorable decree.
❤️ Pomegranate: associated in many traditions with abundance, merits or good deeds.
There is no single universal Rosh Hashanah menu, which is part of the point. What we eat changes with family, origin, culture and tradition.
***⚠️ Understanding Jew Hatred and How It Changes
Jew hatred has appeared in different forms across different times and societies. In Christian Europe it was often expressed through religious accusations and blood libels. Later racial theories portrayed Jews as biologically dangerous. Nazi Germany pushed those ideas to genocidal extremes. In the Soviet Union, anti-Jewish discrimination and propaganda could be expressed through the language of anti-Zionism, political disloyalty and conspiracy. Jew hatred has also appeared in parts of the Arab and Muslim world and in other political and religious environments.
The language and ideology can change while familiar patterns remain: demonizing Jews, blaming Jews collectively, treating them as uniquely dangerous, excluding them, or presenting hostility toward them as morally necessary. That is one reason learning the history matters.
For readers who want to explore this further, Dr. Naya Lekht writes and teaches about the history and evolution of Jew hatred, including Soviet anti-Zionism and contemporary anti-Zionism. Her work includes Back in the USSR: The Afterlife of Soviet Anti-Zionism, which examines how Soviet anti-Zionist narratives continue to shape contemporary hostility toward Jews and Israel.
Natan Sharansky, a former Soviet political prisoner and Jewish human-rights activist, developed his well-known 3D test, looking at demonization, double standards and delegitimization as ways to distinguish ordinary criticism of Israel from hostility that crosses into Jew hatred. His books include The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror and Fear No Evil: The Classic Memoir of a Refusenik and Prisoner of Conscience.
Natasha H. Pein, who grew up under Soviet oppression, writes about Soviet treatment of Jewish identity and what she sees as continuities between Soviet anti-Zionist narratives and contemporary anti-Zionism. Her book The Refusenik: A Memoir of Soviet Jewish Life and the Struggle for Freedom describes the experience of growing up Jewish under Soviet rule and the struggle to preserve Jewish identity and seek freedom.
Professor Andrew Pessin has written extensively about anti-Zionism, BDS, campus culture and hostility toward Jews and Israel. He co-edited Anti-Zionism on Campus: The University, Free Speech, and BDS, which examines how anti-Zionist activism and BDS campaigns affect Jewish students, academic life and public discourse.
Closer to home, Atlanta educator Brendan Murphy, founding director of the Bearing Witness Institute for Interreligious and Ecumenical Dialogue at Marist School, has spent decades teaching the Holocaust and helping Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities understand Jew hatred, prejudice and one another. Through the Institute, he leads workshops on the Holocaust, antisemitism, religious identity, interfaith relationships and confronting prejudice through historical learning and honest conversation.
Learn more about the Bearing Witness Institute and its workshops here: Bearing Witness Institute for Interreligious and Ecumenical Dialogue.
The goal is not simply to memorize a definition, but to learn the history well enough to recognize when criticism or political disagreement turns into collective blame, dehumanization, exclusion, discrimination or hostility toward Jews.
****⚠️ A Difficult Layer Added to Simchat Torah
Content note: violence, massacre and kidnapping on October 7.
On the morning of October 7, 2023, Israelis were at the end of the holiday season. Families were home and gathered for the holiday, while young people were dancing at a music festival. In the early morning, Hamas-led attackers crossed into Israel and deliberately targeted civilians in their homes, communities and at the festival. They murdered families, burned people alive, tortured victims, committed sexual violence, mutilated bodies and abducted hostages. This was not an accident, a spontaneous eruption or an unavoidable consequence of war. It was a planned massacre, orchestrated to create terror, inflict maximum psychological trauma and make ordinary Jewish life feel unsafe.
For the families attacked and for Jewish people across Israel and around the world, this was not a battlefield they had entered. The violence was deliberately brought into their homes, communities and a holiday. It was a diabolical plan that is difficult to comprehend: human beings deliberately planned and carried out these atrocities against other human beings. There is no humane justification for murdering children, slaughtering families, abusing bodies, terrorizing communities or kidnapping civilians. Anyone who orchestrates such acts has chosen cruelty, dehumanization and terror over humanity.
The Shoah (Holocaust) remains the clearest and most horrifying example of what can happen when Jew hatred becomes organized, systematic and dehumanizing. It was planned, bureaucratic and carried out on a massive scale, making it both profoundly inhuman and terrifyingly deliberate. Since then, Jewish people have continued to be targeted, attacked and threatened, both in Israel and in Jewish communities around the world. Jews have faced persecution and violence throughout history, before and after the Shoah.
That is why October 7 cannot be understood only as a date on a calendar or as one isolated occurrence. It was an exceptionally horrific attack and a wake-up call, but it also belongs to a longer history in which Jews have repeatedly been targeted. For many people, October 7 shattered the belief that such violence could not happen again, or that it would remain distant from ordinary families and communities. It forced many Jews to confront something their people have known for generations: even during times of safety and celebration, Jewish communities have had to remain aware that hatred can return.
This is also part of why Israel is deeply needed by Jews. Israel is not only a country or a political idea; for many, it is a refuge and a place of safety, a home where Jews can live openly as Jews and know that there is somewhere to go if they are threatened elsewhere. Its existence also serves as a deterrent: it means that Jews are not entirely dependent on the goodwill of another government or majority for their protection. Even during war, when Israel is facing grave danger and profound suffering, many Jews still see it as one of the safest places in the world to live openly as Jewish people. That does not mean Israel is free from danger, or that every Jewish person must feel the same way about it. It means that the existence of a Jewish state, capable of defending itself and offering refuge, remains deeply significant to Jewish survival, security and peoplehood.
For Israelis, and for many across Am Yisrael, the wider Jewish people, that memory now sits alongside a celebration that existed long before it. October 7 is not merely a date that happened to coincide with Simchat Torah. It is the date on which a planned massacre shattered homes, families and a sense of safety. The two are now permanently connected for many Jews—not because the holiday caused the violence, but because the violence was deliberately carried out on that holiday.
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