72 | SEPTEMBER 26 • 2024
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t’s time for apples and honey, friends and family,
and a whole new Jewish year. Rosh Hashanah
begins Oct. 2 this year, and kids across the
community are getting ready.
For Rosh Hashanah this year, Lilly
Berg is starting a new tradition. The
11-year-old from Bloomfield Hills will
be running her first honey competition,
where the guests around the table for
the holiday meal will try different
types of honey and rate them.
“I thought it would be a cool idea,”
she says, explaining that her family is
collecting honey sourced from places
as far away as Africa and Australia.
“If it’s the best one, we’re going to
have the same honey next year, and
new competitors to compete with it to
see if there’s a new winner.”
She came up with the idea as a fun way
to celebrate the holiday and points out
that there’s both a tasty element and some
symbolism involved. “The honeys represent
different kinds of sweetness,” she says. “In a year,
there’s different kinds of good things that happen.”
It’s a new tradition she says she’s eager to add to
longtime holiday favorites, such as tashlich, which, since she
was a baby, has been a time to gather with others to cast off sins, writing
down mistakes from the past year and throwing them into the water on
pieces of biodegradable paper to let them go.
Her aunt, Megan Brudney, senior associate rabbi at Temple Beth El, leads
the ritual.
“When I do that, it makes me feel like I’m talking to nature,” Lilly says.
“You write down something you’ve
been worrying about, and it goes
away. It’s very comforting to get
stuff off of my chest.”
There’s guitar music, lunch —
and it’s beautiful, she says.
After all, the High Holidays
are about forgiveness and
hope, she explains. “This is
about letting yourself forgive
yourself, and knowing that
even though things are hard
sometimes, there’s always a new year,
and always a chance for good things
to happen.”
The High Holidays are a good
time for self-reflection, says Debbie
Morosohk, director of education for
Temple Beth El. It’s a time for thinking
about what kind of friend, child or
sibling you’ve been in the past year, and
how you’d like the year ahead to be.
“Just think about what you can do and
goal setting,” she says.
She often talks to kids around the High
Holidays about how, in the liturgy, the Hebrew word
for sin, chet, means something like missing the mark, as
you would on a dart board. It’s not always possible to hit the
bullseye, she says, “So, that’s what Judaism is teaching us,” she explains.
“When we’re messing up, it’s giving us the benefit of the doubt, saying
‘you’re always trying to do the right thing.’ It’s assuming we’re always trying
to do the right thing, but we can’t always make it.”
The new year, however, represents a chance to start over again, Morosohk
says. “You get a fresh, new start, and that’s something to celebrate.”
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5785!
KAREN SCHWARTZ CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Say Hello To
ROSH HASHANAH
KIDS SECTION
Lilly
Berg