Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year (the new year is 5785) starts tomorrow evening and ends Friday evening. The local Hillel, in its generosity, offered faculty and staff a New Year gift basket, containing several items traditionally associated with this holiday, like apples and honey.
But the large cloth bag, which I picked up on my way home, was full of goodies:
Two round challah
3 apples
a small jar of honey
a honey dipping stick
THREE boxes of matzoh ball soup mix
and three erasers,
all shown below. (I love challah!) It was a bracing relief fron the tensions of the afternoon when I watched Iranian missiles land on Israeli soil. Fortunately, only one person seems to have been killed, ironically a Palestinian from Gaza who was cut down on the West Bank by a missile.
Maybe I am not a good enough Jew, but I do not get what the erasers are for. I am sure a reader will instruct me; my guess is that it is to erase the bad things from last year.
שנה טובה (shanah tova)!
Hmmm. Don’t know what the erasers are for. Maybe they are for erasing. (Just kidding.) Or maybe they are to erase (forgive) the slights that others have committed against you over the year. My mother sent me a tiny plastic bear filled with Israeli honey. I sent her a thank you text. (Not good enough, I know.)
Glad to see this – cheers.
Very thoughtful of Hillel, especially with all the mishigas of the pali groups here at the start of classes. For me, there would be some challah French Toast in my immediate future.
shana tova!
+1
I read one woman who revealed that her ‘secret’ recipe for matzo ball soup that everyone raves about is to just buy a box of the Manischewitz mix and then reconstitute it with Seltzer water instead of tap water.
So maybe add ‘seltzer water’ to your next shopping list! I myself haven’t tried it yet, but I intend to
Shana tova to you and yours (including a fine bunch of readers), and a year of peace, plenty, intellectual richness, and a river of great posts.
Shanah tovah! May you be written in the book of life for another year. No idea about the erasers, but they are inscribed, “To err is human; to forgive is divine,” and forgiveness is part of the RH tradition. I’d have thought one was enough, though. I too am bummed by the violence.
I had looked for information about why erasers are a part of the holiday. I had not found anything in particular, but they do seem to be very much a part of the swag for the occasion.