‘A very honest time’: Santa Fe’s Jewish community celebrates Rosh Hashanah

As rabbi at Temple Beth Shalom, Neil Amswych always hopes it’s his message that will spiritually move people when they come to a service.

“I’d like to think it’s always the sermon that moves people, and sometimes it does,” he said in a recent interview. “But in reality, it’s also those moments music helps lift you to a different place.”

The Reform congregation’s strong musical background will get an opportunity to shine during Rosh Hashanah services this week.

The first of the Jewish High Holidays, which conclude with Yom Kippur in October, Rosh Hashanah is the start of the new year in accordance with the Jewish calendar. It’s a holiday that’s rich with tradition, including eating apples and honey to symbolize a wish for a “sweet” new year.

The Tashlich ceremony, meanwhile, involves celebrants symbolically casting away their sins into a body of water — which might have a certain resonance for people living in Santa Fe, who a month earlier cast their “glooms” into a marionette for them to be burned: “We’re the original Zozobra,” Amswych said with a laugh.

Amswych and other faith leaders in Santa Fe’s Jewish community described Rosh Hashanah as a time for both celebration and reflection and taking stock of the past year.

“If you’re doing the season properly, it’s a very honest time,” he said. “So it’s very challenging, but it’s very rewarding.”

Rosh Hashanah, which this year began Monday evening and ends Wednesday, is when Jewish people across the world ask to be inscribed in “the book of life” for another year, a process that culminates during Yom Kippur.

Cindy Freedman, cantor at HaMakom, said part of the intention of the season is for people to take stock of how they may have “missed the mark” in the past year and how they want to live their lives in the year to come.

“I always joke that I may have made mistakes this past year, but I don’t want to make the same mistakes next year,” she said. “I want to make different ones. It’s a lot about forgiveness.”

One of Freedman’s favorite parts of the holiday is the liturgy, which at HaMakom is sung by everyone, not just a choir. Several years post-pandemic, she said it’s also special that the congregation is “finally at a place where we can really be together.”

Amswych voiced a similar feeling, although he noted Temple Beth Shalom also streams services for those who can’t attend in person: “We want people together however they can be together.”

A less positive change is a requirement this year that everyone who wants to attend HaMakom services RSVP in advance. An RSVP used to be requested; in a time of increasing threats against the Jewish community, it’s now mandatory, although Freedman noted the possibility of violence is all too common at any type of public event these days.

“It’s just a little way of weeding things out so that we know that everyone who’s there really wants to be there,” she said.

One of the most significant traditions during this week’s celebrations is the blowing of the shofar, a curved ram’s horn.

Rabbi Berel Levertov of the Santa Fe Jewish Center said the shofar symbolizes crying out to God.

“We call out and say that we yearn to be better people, we yearn to overcome all the darkness with love, we yearn to be light into the world,” he said. “We yearn to have this relationship with our creator, and we ask that the creator show his face and be there with us.”

Levertov’s mother, Bracha Levertov, died shortly after the High Holidays last year, and, in accordance with tradition, he has been praying the Mourner’s Kaddish for her every day over the past 11 months.

“My community supported me in that even though we don’t usually have daily gatherings for prayers,” he said. “They stood with me.”

The experience gave him more time to reflect on the meaning of the Kaddish prayer, which asks for a peaceful world. It’s a message he plans to carry with him into the High Holidays.

“I’m going to reflect on that in my sermons and my teachings about the holidays, about our mission and purpose in life in requesting and praying that God’s peaceful energy be manifest into the world,” he said. “The world needs it.”

Amswych said his sermons for this year will have the theme of “sacred struggle” and will include an exploration of what people in the congregation are wrestling with, including many different perspectives on the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza and the pull between tradition and modernity.

In a polarized world, he said, the beauty of communal prayer is that it brings people who have different backgrounds and perspectives together to celebrate the start of something new.

“Our temple exists to draw people together, to help them feel safe in a challenging world, and so that’s what the High Holy Day services are about, too,” he said.