The ritual of Tashlich is an all-encompassing symbolic representation of the High Holidays. This process of releasing sins into the river comes directly from the book of Micah, verse 19: “He will again have compassion upon us; He will subdue our iniquities; and Thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the sea.”
It’s wonderfully intuitive – as participants in the ritual tear up the pieces of bread, they acknowledge their sins with a faint whisper and a prayer. Then, once repentance is made clear, the guilt-ridden crumbs are thrown into the running water, to be carried away by the currents.
The crumbs, however, are not always carried afar. Where many Jews live, including in Tidewater, the breadcrumbs often wash up on the beach, remain floating in the lake, or are eaten by the aquatic animals inhabiting their waters.
As Joanne Palmer of the Jewish Standard, a regional newspaper serving North Jersey and Rockland, New York, recalls, “someone at our lunch fantasized about the ducks getting ready for their annual feast. ‘I know I shouldn’t eat all that bread but I can’t help it,’ she imagined a duck saying. ‘It’s so tempting. Even though it goes straight to my thighs.’”
It’s a funny anecdote, but ultimately, there is some truth in the anthropomorphic situation posed here. Ducks, fish, and other wildlife that receive the sin-contaminated bread, in many ways do not benefit from the extra gluten cast into their waters.
In fact, according to an article on the Chabad website, the ritual is not exactly aligned with Jewish law. “On Shabbat and holidays, one is not allowed to feed any animals that aren’t one’s responsibility and are not dependent upon him for their sustenance.”
In the decades since this moral dilemma has been posed, alternatives such as frozen peas and river-friendly grains have been championed by Jewish environmental organizations. The Jewish environmental organization Repair the Sea (Tikkun HaYam) has pushed the conversation a step further by introducing a new kind of Tashlich ritual that suggests cleaning up pollution in waterways rather than producing more.
Created in 2018 by Rabbi Ed Rosenthal, Reverse Tashlich is essentially an organized trash clean-up through a Jewish lens.
Rooted in the Jewish value of Repair the World (Tikkun Olam), the concept of Reverse Tashlich is maybe just as intuitive as its traditional counterpart. It was brought to Tidewater by Andrea Tank, Ohef Sholom Temple’s Sisterhood president.
Having worked for the Sierra Club and lobbied on behalf of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Tank is extremely aware of the environmental crisis of the 21st century and the importance of Tikkun Olam.
“There’s a lot of young people that have a huge concern for our environment,” Tank says. “To me, this is a very physical way to demonstrate your care and repair of the world.”
Ohef Sholom’s Rabbi Rosalin Mandelberg agrees. “It is a creative and good way of reimagining an old tradition for a new day,” she says. “And though it isn’t a replacement for the traditional ritual of casting one’s sins away, it calls upon Jewish communities to do something just as important – be good stewards of the planet.”
The idea began as a joke when Rabbi Rosenthal, founder and CEO of Tikkun HaYam, was explaining the tradition to members of Scooby Jew, the Jewish scuba-diving club he created at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla. One of them pushed back.
“There’s already more than enough human sin in the water,” the student said. “Why don’t we take some of it out instead?”
Rosenthal took the challenge seriously. He recruited five students, and together they pulled about 75 pounds of debris out of the mangroves along Eckerd’s mile and a half of waterfront.
The next year, the group grew to 10 students, eventually prompting Rosenthal to take the concept off campus and reach out to synagogues across the Tampa Bay area.
“I was really surprised at the response,” he says. “It showed me that there’s an interest, but there was no vehicle in the Jewish world to raise awareness of it.”
Almost a decade later that response has scaled well beyond Tampa. Last year alone, 320 teams in 31 countries participated in reverse Tashlich events, including a Newport News-based chapter already serving Tidewater.
“When you combine the awareness of the mitzvah and recognize it’s fulfilling the mitzvah,” Rosenthal says, “an ordinary action like a beach cleanup becomes a holy action — no different than going to synagogue.”
The concept has strong roots in religious values, drawing heavily on Bal Tashchit, the biblical prohibition against needless waste. Rosenthal also points to Tza’ar Ba’alei Chayim, the prohibition against causing needless suffering to animals.
“It’s very bad for the fish,” Rosenthal says of the use of bread for Tashlich. “It’s not their normal food.” But he doesn’t ask people to abandon the traditional ritual altogether.
Instead, he recommends observers use pebbles and seashells – things already native to the water. Seashells are made of calcium carbonate, a compound that the ocean is increasingly starved of by rising acidity.
As Rabbi Rosenthal says, “We in the Western world take water for granted, because it’s the most common substance on the planet… in Hebrew, our tradition refers to it as mayim chayim — living water. The water is alive, and it gives life. It sustains life. Without it, we die.”
