//essays//
Fall 2017
The Golden Hour
Claire Spaulding
O God, my God, I pray that these things never end:
The sand and the sea,
The rush of the waters…
-- Hannah Senesh
Traditions are all about holding on. They are the memories we carry with us from year to year, the scaffolding on which we build a future that is firmly grounded in the past.
Tashlich is a paradox: it is a tradition of letting go.
For the past three Rosh Hashanahs, I have walked with a group of students from the Kraft Center down to Riverside Park to throw breadcrumbs into the running water of the Hudson, symbolically casting away our sins from the past year in order to make a fresh start with each other and with God. I think of this ritual, known as tashlich, as something that happens in nature. In Manhattan, however, it is impossible to forget that you are in the middle of a bustling city, especially when most of the Jewish population of the Upper West Side is trying to cram itself into a few hundred feet of a bike path. There are Jews singing and dancing, Jews running after children, Jews oblivious to the plight of the few unfortunate bikers trying to get through the crowd. (I once saw an entire square of matzah floating downstream.) Amidst the praying and laughing and shouting, the sun sets over New Jersey, and for a few fleeting moments, the river blazes gold.
As I sit on the rocks and break bread into crumbs, I usually cry.
I feel so lost in those moments. Adrift on the water. New York in all its glorious chaos seems infinitely far, in time and space, from the Rosh Hashanahs of my childhood. I have already let go of so many of the things I used to hold dear—sitting next to my best friend at morning services, taking my mom’s giant loaves of round challah out of the oven, my fourth-grade Hebrew school teacher pouring honey directly into my mouth, the smell of autumn in Virginia. Is it possible I have anything left to cast away?
College is one long coming-of-age ritual, a four-year journey of moving away and starting over. As students, we live in the liminal space between our childhood and adult lives. We never truly settle in. Where will we go to cast away our sins in a year? Perhaps here again. In two years? Three? The river may already have carried us on, away from this shore.
In a world and a time that feel infinitely unstable, letting go takes courage. Even letting go of the bad things: regrets, hurts, missed opportunities. It is terrifying to think that we may accidentally cast away too much, the good along with the bad; we might change too quickly, and grow up too soon. The High Holidays have a lot of nerve: in the middle of four years of renewal and transformation, four years of instability and homesickness and self-discovery, how dare Rosh Hashanah ask us to experience all of that even harder?
And yet--
I learned in my first year of college that a few moments by the Hudson can seem more expansive than entire days on campus. It is possible to feel intensely alone in the presence of the river. When I go down to sit on the rocks, I am oriented outwards towards the water, towards the sunset and the horizon, towards more openness than I can find anywhere else in Manhattan. The breeze lifts me gently away from the anxieties that the tight spaces of the city seem to trap and amplify. Sitting with the river each year, I feel small enough—humble enough—to fit into the world again. I am able to breathe.
The shore of the river is its own liminal space: a border between the human and the non-human, Manhattan and Hudson. But there is something stable about it nonetheless. It is always there, always quiet. Even as the river flows on, relentlessly carrying me forward into the future, the shore invites me to return.
When I take my last deep breath and turn away from my tashlich castoffs, I am always a little startled to find that I am not floating alone on the water, after all. I am still surrounded by people, many of them sitting closer to me than I had realized. On the bike path above me, Jews of all shapes and sizes are still laughing and dancing and praying, spilling down the riverbank in both directions. Children run after their parents. Congregants sing with their communities. The Hillel group, scattered to the rocks and waves, converges again for a final prayer.
Traditions, like love, happen before we notice. By the time we’ve let go of anything, we are already reaching for something else.
College is an unstable time, but we do not merely float through it. Quite the opposite: we forge friendships and practices and traditions with desperate intensity. We pour our hearts into our communities despite, or perhaps because of, our awareness of their transience. How very Jewish, to try to build something holy—some connection with the eternal—in the most ephemeral of spaces.
I have come down to the Hudson these past three years with people who were strangers at first and are now some of my closest friends. Some of my tashlich companions from my first two years have already graduated; in another two years, I will be gone, too. But for now, a dozen of us are here with each other for this ritual of change, as difficult and overwhelming as it might be. We are in this together.
In a few short minutes, the blazing golden sun will set. The crowds will melt away. Right now, I have my arms around my friends, and we are singing. It is enough to make me think I can make a tradition of seeking newness. If nothing else, I can hold onto the very act of letting go.
Tashlich is a paradox: it is a tradition of letting go.
For the past three Rosh Hashanahs, I have walked with a group of students from the Kraft Center down to Riverside Park to throw breadcrumbs into the running water of the Hudson, symbolically casting away our sins from the past year in order to make a fresh start with each other and with God. I think of this ritual, known as tashlich, as something that happens in nature. In Manhattan, however, it is impossible to forget that you are in the middle of a bustling city, especially when most of the Jewish population of the Upper West Side is trying to cram itself into a few hundred feet of a bike path. There are Jews singing and dancing, Jews running after children, Jews oblivious to the plight of the few unfortunate bikers trying to get through the crowd. (I once saw an entire square of matzah floating downstream.) Amidst the praying and laughing and shouting, the sun sets over New Jersey, and for a few fleeting moments, the river blazes gold.
As I sit on the rocks and break bread into crumbs, I usually cry.
I feel so lost in those moments. Adrift on the water. New York in all its glorious chaos seems infinitely far, in time and space, from the Rosh Hashanahs of my childhood. I have already let go of so many of the things I used to hold dear—sitting next to my best friend at morning services, taking my mom’s giant loaves of round challah out of the oven, my fourth-grade Hebrew school teacher pouring honey directly into my mouth, the smell of autumn in Virginia. Is it possible I have anything left to cast away?
College is one long coming-of-age ritual, a four-year journey of moving away and starting over. As students, we live in the liminal space between our childhood and adult lives. We never truly settle in. Where will we go to cast away our sins in a year? Perhaps here again. In two years? Three? The river may already have carried us on, away from this shore.
In a world and a time that feel infinitely unstable, letting go takes courage. Even letting go of the bad things: regrets, hurts, missed opportunities. It is terrifying to think that we may accidentally cast away too much, the good along with the bad; we might change too quickly, and grow up too soon. The High Holidays have a lot of nerve: in the middle of four years of renewal and transformation, four years of instability and homesickness and self-discovery, how dare Rosh Hashanah ask us to experience all of that even harder?
And yet--
I learned in my first year of college that a few moments by the Hudson can seem more expansive than entire days on campus. It is possible to feel intensely alone in the presence of the river. When I go down to sit on the rocks, I am oriented outwards towards the water, towards the sunset and the horizon, towards more openness than I can find anywhere else in Manhattan. The breeze lifts me gently away from the anxieties that the tight spaces of the city seem to trap and amplify. Sitting with the river each year, I feel small enough—humble enough—to fit into the world again. I am able to breathe.
The shore of the river is its own liminal space: a border between the human and the non-human, Manhattan and Hudson. But there is something stable about it nonetheless. It is always there, always quiet. Even as the river flows on, relentlessly carrying me forward into the future, the shore invites me to return.
When I take my last deep breath and turn away from my tashlich castoffs, I am always a little startled to find that I am not floating alone on the water, after all. I am still surrounded by people, many of them sitting closer to me than I had realized. On the bike path above me, Jews of all shapes and sizes are still laughing and dancing and praying, spilling down the riverbank in both directions. Children run after their parents. Congregants sing with their communities. The Hillel group, scattered to the rocks and waves, converges again for a final prayer.
Traditions, like love, happen before we notice. By the time we’ve let go of anything, we are already reaching for something else.
College is an unstable time, but we do not merely float through it. Quite the opposite: we forge friendships and practices and traditions with desperate intensity. We pour our hearts into our communities despite, or perhaps because of, our awareness of their transience. How very Jewish, to try to build something holy—some connection with the eternal—in the most ephemeral of spaces.
I have come down to the Hudson these past three years with people who were strangers at first and are now some of my closest friends. Some of my tashlich companions from my first two years have already graduated; in another two years, I will be gone, too. But for now, a dozen of us are here with each other for this ritual of change, as difficult and overwhelming as it might be. We are in this together.
In a few short minutes, the blazing golden sun will set. The crowds will melt away. Right now, I have my arms around my friends, and we are singing. It is enough to make me think I can make a tradition of seeking newness. If nothing else, I can hold onto the very act of letting go.
//Claire Spaulding is a junior in Columbia College. She can be reached at cks2134@columbia.edu.