Rabbi’s Message: August 18, 2026
By Rabbi Lauren Ben-Shoshan
As we are settling into the Hebrew of month of Elul, the month of preparation before our High Holy Day Celebrations, I have been considering the meaning of each of our rituals. Which means that this week I have spent a lot of time thinking about Tashlich.
Between Erev Rosh HaShanah and the entrance of Yom Kippur, Jews around the world walk toward water. We gather beside rivers and lakes, streams and oceans. We empty our pockets, shake out the corners of our clothing, and sometimes toss breadcrumbs, birdseed, or even small pebbles into the water. We watch the ripples spread. We watch the current carry something away.
The ritual itself takes its name from the closing verses of the prophet Micah:
“Who is a God like You,forgiving iniquityand remitting transgression…You will take us back in love;You will cover up our iniquities,You will cast—v’tashlich—all our sins into the depths of the sea.”(Micah 7:18–19)
Micah’s poetry lays open an extraordinary image of forgiveness and possibility. Imagine, he suggests, that the things we have done wrong could be lifted from us and carried so far away that they sink into the deepest parts of the sea. Centuries later, we turned Micah’s metaphor into movement.
One of our earliest clear records of the ritual of Tashlich comes from the Maharil, Rabbi Yaakov ben Moshe Moelin, the great recorder of medieval Ashkenazi Jewish practice. Writing around the turn of the fifteenth century, he describes a custom of going to a river on Rosh HaShanah after the meal and symbolically casting away our sins. Later, the Rema would record the practice more explicitly: Jews “go to the river and say the verse, ‘You will cast all their sins into the depths of the sea.’”
But before we can cast anything away, there is another step—one that is much easier to overlook. We have to know what we are carrying.
This is one of the spiritual skills that the month of Elul asks us to practice: awareness. Before teshuvah can begin, we have to notice. We cannot cast away what we have not first been willing to see.
And then comes a second spiritual skill: discernment.
Because not everything we carry should be thrown into the water. There may be grief that still deserves to be carried. A boundary we worked hard to establish. A responsibility that would be much easier to discard than to fulfill. A mistake whose guilt we may eventually release, but whose lesson we desperately need to keep.
That may be why I find Tashlich so compelling. Judaism could have left us with Micah’s beautiful words. Instead, our ancestors created a ritual in which we engage with creation. We stand by the cleansing, living waters and we reach into our pockets. Then we open our hands. Our bodies rehearse what we hope our hearts might learn to do.
As we move through Elul and toward the New Year, we do not need to arrive at the water already transformed. The work of teshuvah is only beginning. But perhaps we can begin by practicing these two skills: awareness enough to notice what we are carrying, and discernment enough to decide what we are ready to do with it.
And when the time comes, may we have the courage to open our hands.
Please join us for Tashlich as a part of our first day Rosh HaShanah Celebrations at Tahoe Vista and South Lake Tahoe on September 12th or in Truckee on September 15th.
