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Jewish World Review
Sept. 25, 2003
/ 28 Elul, 5763
Keep the stress levels low for High Holy Days
By
Nora Koch
Some practical advice
http://www.jewishworldreview.com |
Roasting the brisket and making enough kugel. Negotiating days off work. Spending extra time with family, even that pompous uncle. Rounding everyone up to go to the synagogue. Pondering a year's worth of spiritual atonement.
With their concentrated and deep spiritual meaning, the Jewish faith's High Holy Days, which begin Friday at sundown, can be a stressful time both internally and externally.
"They're the days that the entire world gets judged and decreed of what will come in the upcoming year," said Rabbi Ephraim Epstein of Congregation Sons of Israel in Cherry Hill, N.J. "That's enough to stir up critical energy."
Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur add up to 10 days of religious activities, including one of fasting and up to three full days of synagogue activity. Even the name for the holiday set, the Days of Awe, inspires intense pondering, Epstein said.
"What I think is the greatest stress is the fact that people know that something great is upon them and they haven't necessarily figured out a way to capture it, and that in its own right causes the most anxiety and frustration," said Epstein.
Over the years, Maxine Butler, a Cherry Hill psychotherapist, has learned how to temper her potential for High Holy Day anxiety.
By now, Butler and her husband of 27 years, David, have worked out the kinks of whose family to eat with on which holiday.
"Everybody is here, all of our siblings, and that's nice, but is also a pain," she said, half-joking. "You have to divide yourself up or have a million people over."
This Rosh Hashanah, Butler will cook for 12, a light crowd compared with the three dozen or so she usually entertains during Passover.
"It's a happy time, mostly, but it's a little sad because the grandmothers are not here anymore," Butler said. To handle that, Butler uses the women's recipes to cook the traditional dinner, which includes beef brisket, chicken soup with matzoh balls, and kugel.
Often, the prospect of cooking a traditional Jewish meal for a large group causes anxiety, especially when a visitor keeps kosher and the cook does not, said Lynn Jungreis, consumer affairs specialist at the Kosher Experience, a store-in-a-store at the Cherry Hill ShopRite.
Three years into the store's existence, Jungreis is a pro at solving one of the season's most perplexing issues: "I have X number of people coming. Do I have enough brisket, or chicken?"
While prepping for the holidays, customers will look to Jungreis and others in the store for recipes, advice on kosher cooking rules, how much brisket is needed to feed a family. The store provides recipes, kosher cooking instructions, and order sheets to buy prepared holiday meals.
For Jungreis, professionally, this week means extra hours, more employees taking and filling orders from the kosher deli, and stocking large orders of traditional holiday foods.
Another potential stressor is the divide in families whose members practice Judaism at different levels of observance. Rabbi Eliyahu Kopel, leader of the newly created Jewish Learning Exchange in Philadelphia, said he had seen hundreds of young people who adopted Orthodox ways in college return home for holidays and have a difficult time worshiping and coexisting with their families' more lax practices.
"It is important for both sides to respect one another. I frequently tell my students: 'When you go back ... if because you're religious you feel like you are better than someone else, then you're not really Orthodox,' " said Kopel, who spends much of his time doing outreach on college campuses.
While the High Holy Days in their own right are intense, "if it's done right, it can be the most unbelievably unstressful time imaginable," Kopel said.
Epstein agrees.
"It's just such a quintessential moment on the Jewish calendar," he said. "It provides for us either to dive right into it and immerse ourselves, or to stand on the outside of it and we can miss the entire thing."
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading."
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Nora Koch is a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Comment by clicking here.
© 2003, The Philadelphia Inquirer Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services
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