A Ritual For the Fall Season and the Jewish New Year

As summer comes to an end in the Northern hemisphere, leaves begin to turn yellow, dry up, fall to the ground and decompose, only to emerge next year in a different natural form.

It is also time to celebrate the Jewish New Year.

I grew up with a secular Jewish father and a Christian Protestant mother. So I got to celebrate both Jewish and Christian holidays and have come to appreciate the power of ritual, regardless of tradition and faith.

Whether you are Jewish or not, celebrating the Jewish New Year is an opportunity, like the leaves in the fall, to let go of what doesn’t serve you anymore and embrace that which you want to enhance in your life.

I offer you a few questions for reflection, as a way to bring more intention into your life.

Want to listen instead? Listen below or click HERE to listen on Sound Cloud.

Prefer to read? Here's a transcription of the video:

It’s the Jewish new year today.

New year is a wonderful time to create some intention, let go of certain things from your past, from the past year, and invite new things into the new year.

So I love ritual and I love intention and I’m happy to celebrate the Jewish holidays and then in January to do the new year again. It’s just an opportunity for a ritual and opportunity for creating intention for some reflection. I think it’s just wonderful, enriching, fulfilling, and we really need it always.

But even more so in these times, which are so challenging. They’re challenging politically and economically and socially and on so many levels, and ecologically. And so here is an opportunity, whether you’re Jewish or not, to reflect on this past year from fall to fall.

Another way that you can reframe it is that the fall season is the season where leaves fall. So we kind of shed what we don’t need anymore. The skin. We don’t need the skin we’ve outgrown or the leaves that have dried out, but they all go back into the earth and get mixed up and come out in a different form the following year.

So the question is in this time of fall, what do you want to let go of and what do you want to shed as you come into fall? And so these are the kind of questions that you can ask yourself and I’m going to list a few.

So what would you like to let go of from this past year? And say thank you to it, but you really don’t want this anymore. You’ve had enough of it. It was too much. It was, it was a hardship. Thank you very much for the lessons. What would you like to let go of?

And then for the coming year, what would you like to invite into this coming year? So it can be anything in any area of your life. What would you like to bring more in to this coming year?

So that’s one set of questions that you can ask.

Then another one is what in yourself are you ready to let go of from this past year? A behavior, a pattern, something that is not serving you. Maybe it’s served you up til now. Maybe it was useful with specific situations and challenges of this past year, but you don’t need it anymore. So what is it that you’re willing to let go of and think about it, state what it is. Let it go and say thank you, good riddance or appreciate how it served you, but you want to let go of it and then ask for this coming year.

What is something within me that I want to enhance, that I want to embrace, that I want to get to know more and dive deeper into it, to this part in me, and I want to embrace it because I wanted to serve me for this coming year.

So this is another set of questions that you can ask yourself around this season.

So have fun with it. Play with it.

Leave a comment below and I will engage with you.

Shona Tova! Happy new year.