Hear that?
It's time for the Fall Festivals again! As always, the season starts with Rosh Hashanah or Yom Teruah, the Feast of Trumpets. It is a day of shouting or blowing the shofar in rememberance and looking forward to the return our King Messiah. It begins the month of Tishri, a month to examine ourselves and prepare our hearts. To celebrate the day, the kids made their own shofars from paper and noise-makers. We attended a service a our community center and heard the different traditional shofar sounds. It is a very upbeat and fun service with lots of shofar blasting and wonderful worship.
Then we baked an apple and honey cake and cut out various shapes like shofars and torah scrolls. We also had pomegranates, apples and honey.
As fun as it was to play, it was even better to eat!
Then the kids made their own crown-shaped paper mache challah loaves.
Finally we took a walk to Lake Brandt in preparation for Yom Kippur, The Day of Atonement.
It's traditional (Tashlich) to throw crumbs of bread into the water as you confess your sins to symbolize how our sins are as far removed from us as East is from the West. We read Micah 7:19.
While we know that Yeshua paid the ultimate price for those sins, the symbolism of watching those pieces of bread slowly float away from us still holds a great deal of meaning and power. We do sin and we are held accountable for those sins and yet even more so, we are forgiven if we ask. It is with grateful hearts that we worship the One True God who loves and forgives us in the midst of our shortcomings.
