Sitting still in a chair on Rosh Hashanah as a child was difficult. The services seemed endless, but in our Conservative synagogue, where we sat family-style, one of the few bright spots included fiddling with the folds of white cloth and knots on my father’s tallit (prayer shawl). The annual Rosh Hashanah liturgy with my father at my side seemed to me as predictable as if it had been written into the laws of nature: like salmon swimming upstream to spawn, like birds migrating south for the winter, like snows melting in the spring sun. We did it every fall, and we surely always would.
But life isn’t like that. My experiences in Jerusalem synagogues on Rosh Hashanah have long since outnumbered my American experiences. I understand more Hebrew than in those days, so the services are less daunting. And, no longer a child, I now wonder what memories of previous holidays washed over my father as he sat in the comfortable pew of a small suburban congregation in southern Maryland.
A recent housekeeping crisis unearthed decades-old family memorabilia long since retrieved from his belongings and nearly forgotten. Tucked between his subscriptions to first-day commemorative envelopes of Israeli stamps was a program from a Rosh Hashanah service in occupied Germany in 1945, in which he participated as part of the US military government. Chronologically, he was merely 19 years old, but his life experience belied his years.
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