“Cast your sins upon the water…”

While participating in a beautiful Taslich ritual (where, on Rosh Hashanah you throw bread into a moving body of water to release what you’d like left behind from the previous year), one of our leaders passed out this quote from Annie Dillard.

"On a shore, eight thousand waves break a day…At any one time, the from breaking waves covers between 3 and 4 percent of the earth’s surface. The acreage of this foam — using the figure 4 percent — is equal to that of the entire continent of North America. By another coincidence, the U.S. population bears nearly the same relation to the world population: 4.6 percent. The U.S. population in other world, although it is the third-largest population among nations, is about as small a portion of the earth’s people as breaking waves’s white foam is the planet’s surface. And the whole North American continent occupies no more space than waves’ foam."

I love that. Also part of the ritual. We wrote phrases in the sand signifying things we also wanted to let go of for the coming of 5768. One of the others I spotted was this.

"May our actions be thoughtful and our sins forgiven."   

Indeed.

• Category: Faith and Such