Starting the year off light

Tomorrow night is the start of Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the Jewish year. Most years, I mark this occasion by going to services with my parents at their synagogue (either with both of them in the evening, or with just Mom in the daytime). But this year, the synagogue remains officially closed; the only in-person event will be an outdoor barbecue, and the service itself will be entirely virtual for the second year in a row. I can't log into that virtual service from home since I'm not officially a member, and we agreed that it would be a bit silly for me to go to my parents' house just so we could watch it together on the computer. So I need to find some other way to commemorate the occasion.

Now, one ritual associated with Rosh Hashanah is Tashlich, or "casting off." You go to a nearby body of water, ideally a flowing river or stream, and throw bread crumbs into it to symbolize casting off your sins. (Actually, it's apparently more popular these days to throw leaves or pebbles, since bread crumbs aren't good for the wildlife.) If that word "sins" has too much baggage for your taste, you can think of it instead as ridding yourself of anything unwanted or harmful in your life: bad habits, unwelcome thoughts, anything that's weighing you down and keeping you from living the kind of life you aspire to.

I tried taking part in this ritual last year, going down to the park and attempting to toss crumbs off the dock into the Raritan River, but the area was crammed with members of a local synagogue who'd come for the same reason. So this year, I'm taking a different approach: I'm going to rid myself of excess baggage by Freecycling it.

I'd already made a start last week by listing our old cordless phone, which we replaced earlier this year because it had become unreliable after we switched back to Verizon. (Occasionally, for no apparent reason, it simply didn't ring when a call came in.) Only one person replied to that post, saying only "I'm interested," but apparently they weren't interested enough to respond when I suggested they fix up a time for pickup. (Why do people do that?) I followed up by listing it on my local Buy Nothing Group, which I've recently joined via Facebook, but so far no takers there either.

But I refused to let this setback daunt me. Today I went through the drawer in our bathroom that serves as an overflow medicine chest and purged two bottles of skincare products and three bottles of mineral supplements that hadn't worked for me. Within minutes of listing them, I already had inquiries about three of these items, and one of them is already gone. That's a promising start.

While I'm at it, I'm doing my best to clear a backlog of other stuff, too. Catching up on long-overdue cleaning tasks, like washing all the glasses on my stemware rack (and the rack itself). Getting up-to-date with all my various medical checkups. And most importantly, finally getting around to donating the remainder of the stimulus money we received during the pandemic. Since we didn't need this money ourselves, we've been trying to donate it in ways that support the community, such as funding a local summer outdoor movie series and helping to Kickstart the coolest bookmobile ever. So today, I sent a message to inquire about donating the $1500 or so we have left to a fund for local businesses. (I'd tried inquiring about this before, but got no response, so this time I decided to try filling out the online form as if I were a business seeking funds and explaining that my "proposed project" is to support other businesses.)

Between freeing myself of things I don't need and getting money to businesses that do need it, I'd say I'm getting the year off to a good start. I may not be exactly free of sin, but I think actively doing something good is probably more helpful than making a promise — which may not even last the whole year — to quit doing something bad.