It’s a telling textualization of Judaism that it’s not a sacrifice or magical act but the embalmed formality of Yizkor—“May God remember the soul of my father/mother, who has gone on to his/her reward”—that has become the primary communication between a living person and his or her deceased. Talmud tells us that the soul, though eternal, is subject to conditions that can be bettered—death cannot be worsened—through two responsibilities undertaken by a surviving heir: charity and righteous deeds. Yizkor enacts one—prayer as deed—while promising the other: “I shall give charity on my father’s/mother’s behalf.”

Zealous in our memory, we should be equally zealous with regard to our memorious technologies. By which I mean we mourners assembled to pronounce this rare prayer should be more charitable toward the fate of the book from which we read it (the word for that book is Mahzor, meaning “cycle”). The quasicyclical scroll was cut for the supersessionary codex, or book, whose materials have been sliced free, into omnimateriality, for screens (whose ancestor, the parochet or “veil,” screened the offerings of Judaism’s first worship). For modern Judaism, however, the codex—which began mass production in the late 1400s, the period of Europe’s most extensive Jewish expulsions—must be the terminant technology, unless electronic tablets, on which all information is egalitarianly accessible and divinely transitive, are to be raised above the congregation.

Keeping faith with the consolations of cycles, of recurrence (Mahzor’s root is chzr, meaning “return”), is the last ritual practice of a Judaism that has abandoned the Sabbath and dietary strictures, God and afterlife, etc. Such a belief, solely in the regulating merit of belief, is embodied not only in the Jewish books—read septennially, annually, monthly, weekly, daily—but also in books in general, if they are read not as commodities, rather as enduring resources (that timeless calendar, the canon).

Only last week, avoiding shul for Rosh Hashanah, I reread Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, Buber’s letters, read the Internet. What did I find? The Death of Books! The End of Books! Today—if you read what is written today—all books seem to be “memory books” (“yizkor buch,” which is Yiddish, indicates a volume memorializing the dead of a particular shtetl or region ravaged by the Holocaust, e.g., the Sefer Marmarosh, which catalogs the names of my cousins in an area including Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine, or the Sárospatak Book, which lists the names of closer relatives from Hungary).

Remembrance, at every instance, threatens an ultimate recursion: We remember so regularly until we’re only remembering we’re remembering. It’s not just the Internet. Recent print media seem to consist entirely of pieties about the death of print media and the inevitable ascension of the digital. Just as our prayerbooks seem to consist entirely of prayers that—though they’re said to be, should be, dedicated to saving our and our relations’ souls—spend the preponderance of their sentences and stanzas mortifying man and praising God. Unwilling to praise or mortify, incapable of salvation, following Rosh Hashanah I wrote the following Yizkor for bookery. Epigraphs as epitaphs, they comprise a page to print and slip between the relevant pages of your Mahzor—for when memory becomes too painful because too rote, or too remote from Yizkor’s words (just as all contemporary words have become too remote from their inscribing).

***

May there never come a future in which a secret can be hidden in a book.

May there never come a future when a child will have to search for what a book is on the computer. For what a book was.

Once books go and with them, covers, may we still find meaning in the words binding and bound.

May we still find comfort in the margin.

Consider the archaic English: boke. As in Chaucer, at the conclusion of Canterbury Tales, disavowing “the boke of Troilus, the boke also of Fame, the boke of the five and twenty Ladies, the boke of the Duchesse, the boke of Seint Valentines day of the Parlement of briddes.” It’s like book, only in past tense.

Blessed is the page, for it is more fraught than the screen. Reading a page, you always know there’s a page you’re not reading just on the other side.

Blessed are the bookmarks: (personal) envelopes, pencils and pens, an ermine’s baculum, my father’s/mother’s expired driver’s license, a scrap of a dead neighbor’s ex libris on which I scribbled the word bibliothanatos, (historical) Mao had bookmarks produced featuring his sayings, “Be serious, be active,” bamboo bookmarks from Nepal, cornhusks from Czechoslovakia, American bookmarks manufactured as advertisements for Heinz in the warty shapes of pickles. Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) first popularized bookmarks. The term now characterizes a computer function that holds a webpage detailing the life of Elizabeth.

Consider Revelation, the last book of the New Testament. Leave it to the goyim to end with Apocalypse. Moses and YHVH—our earliest professional writers of fiction—and even the deity’s amateur “son,” who only wrote once, one illegible word dug into sand (John 8)—would never have allowed it.

Reward with a girlfriend my friend H., a junior librarian from a fine family of Los Angeles. His recent email mentions his databasing nearly 30 books called “The Last Book,” or a variation on that title.

Grant the justice/splendor of the smell of books, which is merely the smell of dust. This, like all sameness, instructs in mortality. After the book is composed, it decomposes. That (and other reasons) is why there are multiple copies.

Grant the meek/radiant feel of books (haptics is the current term): the texture, the heft in hand. Note for posterity that if you closed your eyes and ran your fingers over a page you could tell which parts of that page were blank and which held ink. Words were palpable, words felt palpable, until the advent of recycling and digital printing (blot forever the 1990s).

Find repose among the taste of books. Find peace from, in a singularly impractical coinage, their “mannaism.” It’s said that monks poisoned the pagetips of forbidden books to punish their readers. It’s said that rabbis placed honey there at the tips to encourage students to lick and go forward. To lick and proceed. Consider however that when the lesson was finished and the book was shut, the honeyed pages would stick together. Consider however that such slavish adherence to factuality would be our own destruction. Woe to the generation that cannot tell stories. Woe to the generation that cannot be told stories.

My father loved Mahler’s emotionalism and range. He loved Mahler’s passion for atypical instruments: harmonium, glockenspiel, mandolin. He loved the way the symphonies incorporate snippets of bird sounds, unpretentious folk music, and Jewish ritual melodies. He loved the humor and intensity he found in Mahler’s work. Mahler’s music messes with people’s heads—the guy was a terribly polarizing figure, much like my father. Dad was a psychiatrist and enfant terrible who ran a community mental health center; he loved working with the mentally ill and loved teasing people who expected him to be a formal, cerebral figure. It delighted him that Mahler had visited Sigmund Freud, who wrote that he admired “the capability for psychological understanding of this man of genius.”

In Mahler Remembered, Norman Lebrecht quotes the 19th-century German conductor Oskar Fried on the composer:

He was a God-seeker. With incredible fanaticism, with unparalleled dedication and with unshakable love he persued a constant search for the divine, both in the individual and in man as a whole. He saw himself bearing a sacred trust; it suffused his whole being. His nature was religious thorough and through in a mystical, not a dogmatic, sense.

Mahler felt a strong connection to the Jewish faith of his childhood, yet converted to Catholicism to qualify for a job at the Vienna Court Opera. (He told a friend that the decision had “cost me a great deal.”) My father, too, felt powerfully drawn to Judaism but not to dogma; he had little interest in rules of any kind. He could chant Torah and daven like nobody’s business, but he delighted in what he called “glatt trayf.”

More than anything else, what I think drew my father to Mahler was the composer’s obsession with death. My dad had nearly died of polio at 9. At 15, he watched his own father have a heart attack in a living room chair and die in front of him. My father had his own heart attack at 39, and he barely recovered from experimental heart surgery at 56, in 1996. Mahler had a weak heart too. Both men were both convinced they would die young. Both were right. Mahler died in 1911, at 51; my dad in 2004, at 64.

The subject of the shadow of death brings me to the Rosh Hashanah connection. My father was famous in our shul for his Torah reading on the second day of the holiday—the binding of Isaac. When I was a teenager, dad’s rendition was a symphony of mortification for me. He’d do dramatically different voices for Abraham (tentative, confused), Isaac (weak, small) and God (really freaking loud). When he got to the moment of truth in the text, he’d slowly raise the Torah pointer in the air as if to plunge it into the scroll, or into Isaac’s bound body. I wanted to die. Today I find this awesome and Mahlerian. I would give anything to be able to hear it again.

The High Holidays are a good time to ponder not just how we’d choose to be different in the coming year, but also the impact of loss and the need to reach out to people on earth while we still can. As a teenager and a twentysomething, I was frequently embarrassed by my dad’s flamboyance and sappiness. The man had no filter. Because he was aware that he could die at any time, he was quick to tell my brother and me how proud he was of us and how much he loved us. (Every time he turned sentimental and beatific, I called him “The Moonie.” He just laughed.) My dad was also inappropriate a lot—he once gave a non-Jewish guest at our Passover Seder a “Crucifixion Barbie” he’d made, complete with stigmata (red nail polish) and a Popsicle-stick cross. He was no angel.

At this time of year, when we ponder the kind of person we want to be in the future, I admire my dad’s authenticity, precisely the quality that embarrassed me about him when I was young. Now I want to emulate it. I spend a lot of time being anxious about what people will think of me. I worry about the embarrassment of failing. But my dad didn’t care.

I also think about conveying my passions to my kids. I remember my dad’s delight when I emailed him from California in 1997, telling him I was thinking about going to a San Francisco Symphony performance of Mahler’s Second. I still have his emailed response:

This is the piece I joined the Boston Pro Musica to sing last year. This is the piece that has haunted me since I was 10. This is the ‘Resurrection.’ When I sang this piece in May, 1996, The Malachamovess was floating on his scrawny horse in front of the second balcony, and I looked him in his eye socket and said, ‘Listen to me, you motherfucker, listen to what I can sing!’ And he rode off in defeat. When you hear this piece, it will change your view of classical music.

My father especially loved the Second’s finale:

Aufersteh’n, ja aufershteh’n
Mein herz, Mein herz in einem nu,
Sterben werd ich um zu leben!
Sterben werd ich um zu leben!

In English, that’s:

Rise again, yes, rise again,
Will you, my heart, in an instant!
Die shall I in order to live.

Is it too much to think of the parallels between this piece and the Torah reading for the second day of Rosh Hashanah? Isaac and Abraham didn’t experience a literal resurrection, but they did leave that hillside with new lives. They’d faced death and loss. They’d seen the power and terror and confusing mercy of God. And it’s only with the awareness of loss that we’re able to rise above our own petty anxieties and take risks, express our true feelings, and live our lives the way they should be lived.

“The symphony must be like the world,” Mahler once told the composer Sibelius. “It must embrace everything!” And so must we—the spiritual, the hilarious, the embarrassing—if we’re to lead our best, richest lives.

For my dad’s unveiling in 2005, we brought a boom-box to the cemetery and blasted the Second Symphony. On the grave, we placed rocks that my cousin Daniella had taken from the garden next to the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center. My husband wore my dad’s old Siegfried and Roy T-shirt. The CD’s chorus sang, “That for which you suffered, to God will it lead you.” My dad (who’d left instructions when he was in the Navy in the 1970s that if he were killed in action he wanted a full military funeral—but including Mahler) would have adored it all.

I miss him every day. When he died, my daughter Josie was not quite 3; I was eight months pregnant with her sister, Maxie. I do see him every day, in a way, in Josie’s musicality and Maxie’s goofy humor. Which isn’t enough, of course. But to be human is to experience loss; Yom Kippur’s Yizkor service makes that abundantly clear. It’s some small consolation, though, that the High Holidays are an opportunity for us all to ponder how to turn our suffering into music. Shanah Tova.

Now when I hear that a friend is cooking a brisket for dinner, I get choked up. A brisket? For me? No, it’s too much. You don’t need to do that. We’ll order Chinese. One of my closest friends revealed the secret ingredient in her family’s brisket recipe, and I started to cry. That’s the moment I realized that I needed to get to the bottom of why so many of us have such a strong emotional attachment to this blah cut of beef that doesn’t sit on a steer anywhere near the sexy sirloin or the fancy filet mignon. Is it because even a pretty bad cook can turn a brisket into a pretty decent dish? Does brisket just scream “happy intact family,” even when it’s not your own family? Is it because while we have lost mother tongues, changed our last names, and moved all over the world, we have somehow managed not to lose our recipes for brisket—recipes that have been handed down and copied and emailed and tweeted? (Whose heart wouldn’t melt a little hearing about Aunt Irene’s New England brisket recipe with sherry and mushrooms, which was passed down to her niece Alice, who gave it to her friend Ellen, who shared it with her nephew John, who let his girlfriend—who had never even eaten a brisket—copy it for her mother so she could help her cook it?)

But our passion for brisket goes beyond the recipe or the result. I wondered if there is something to the fact that brisket is just so unpretentious. It has no airs. It has a pretty unimpressive provenance. It did come over early from Europe but is one of a very few not to claim that it came over on the Mayflower. Nor was barbecued brisket born with a silver spoon in its mouth. When the breast of a steer was first slow smoked in the hinterlands of South America and/or the Caribbean, it was by people more likely to be called “natives” than “chefs.” Or could it be that for years, brisket was so affordable you could serve your whole family, invite the neighbors, set an extra place for the rabbi and his wife, and still have leftovers for a week?

While all these things are true and contribute to its lasting resonance, I believe the real reason for brisket’s powerful allure is even simpler. Brisket will be what you want it to be. And that is more than you can say about your teenager, your hair, your Labradoodle, or most members of Congress. On an emotional level, you can celebrate with it, mourn with it, diet with it, defrost with it, court with it, make a friend with it. Come to think of it, there are very few brisket recipes that do not have the word love somewhere in their head notes or descriptions. On a cooking level, it’s a perfect culinary blank canvas, adept at adapting to everything you rub on or throw in, from garlic salt to Liquid Smoke to miso to gingersnaps to huge gulps of Dr Pepper. Joan Nathan rightly calls brisket the Zelig of meats.

During an entire year of brisketeering (I’ll confess to obsession), I cooked with and interviewed some of the country’s top chefs, cookbook writers, pit masters, home cooks, food historians, butchers, and ranchers. I researched the subject hungrily, in hundreds of cookbooks, history books, culinary memoirs, and tomato sauce-stained archival recipe books. I traveled from Maine to Kansas City to Baltimore to Brooklyn to eat brisket and, because I love my boyfriend almost as much as I love brisket, once brought two pounds of still-warm leftovers home from Boston on Jet Blue in the overhead.

The result? Now brisket has its own book. I carefully evaluated the merits of every brisket recipe as well as the intentions of every brisket maker. My method? High hopes. Higher standards. Tender meat and tough love.

These recipes have won competitions, won hearts, made us smile at their utter simplicity, surprised us with their ingenuity, dazzled us with their flavor, touched us with their devotion to not changing a single thing. (One favorite, a braised brisket recipe from Nach Waxman, a historian and founder of New York’s Kitchen Arts & Letters, is included here.) It is clear—and wonderful—that there are many different roads to brisket bliss. To quote the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mark Strand: “I raise my fork and I eat.”

Stephanie Pierson, an author, journalist, and social historian, has collaborated with chefs on five cookbooks. This is adapted from The Brisket Book: A Love Story with Recipes by Stephanie Pierson, which will be published by Andrews McMeel Publishing in October 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author.

The Schwartz brothers are tech-savvy Modern Orthodox Jews, which makes them well-positioned to forecast their customers’ desires. “Anything we find useful that we want in our phone, we’ll develop,” Barry Schwartz said. RustyBrick’s 25 Jewish apps include an iPhone Siddur, an iPhone Tanach, and a Shabbat app that provides candle-lighting times and has been downloaded more than 400,000 times. RustyBrick’s shofar app—a simple, free, and, it must be said, completely irritating application that plays the four distinct shofar sounds, was downloaded thousands of times in the days leading up to Rosh Hashanah last year, Barry said.

When the twins were in high school in Monsey, N.Y., the nearby ultra-Orthodox hamlet, Ronnie discovered a knack for design and software development. They formed their company in 1999, while they were both in college; today they have 19 employees. Barry, the charismatic brother, handles the business operations, while Ronnie, more reserved, oversees software development. “Anything not related to technology I do,” Barry said. “We overlap,” Ronnie corrected. Twins.

The Siddur was the first iPhone app they developed, in 2008; Barry, who bought the first-generation iPhone, wanted to have a prayerbook on his new device. “There’s a lot of math put in there,” Ronnie said of the Siddur, which took him several years to complete and which he still tweaks and updates. The Siddur adjusts both to its user and the changing Jewish calendar, enabling a user to store preferences—Ashkenazic or Sephardic, for example—and see what prayers to say on a specific day at a specific time.

Observant Jews, of course, don’t use technology during Shabbat and other holidays, returning to their bound, old-fashioned prayerbooks. RustyBrick’s apps account for that. “It actually grays out certain prayers on Shabbos,” Barry said, “not that we can stop people from opening the app.” The blocking of text is not a rebuke, but a reminder: “We don’t want them to pray a weekday davening on a Shabbos,” Barry said. “We gray out things so they can’t access it.”

One of the more gimmicky yet cool features of the Siddur app is a world map that allows users to see where other people are using the application at that moment. In the mornings, they often see 300 to 400 people on the map, all praying with the Siddur. While users can turn off that feature within the application settings, many don’t. One year, Ronnie recalled, he was in Israel on Yom Kippur, and when the holiday was over, he clicked on the map to find other people in other parts of the world where Yom Kippur was still going on, also using the app. But what can you do?

These products enable a moderately tech-savvy consumer to connect with more traditional elements of worship. The RustyBrick brothers are less inclined to play up this angle of their work, preferring instead to explain the intricate, and impressive, features of their apps. Barry’s favorite part is the interactive mi’ sheberach list, where a user can add the name of a person he wants to pray for. Provided your settings have enabled this feature, other users can see that name. “People in the iPhone community can actually pray for each other,” Barry said.

The Schwartzes’ latest project is poised to move RustyBrick from personal technology to something closer to business services: their recently lauched ShulCloud. Based on the reasonable notion that synagogues generally use outdated, confusing electronic systems, they developed subscription-based software for synagogues—it streamlines email services and offers members the option of online payment. “We’re trying to make the life of anyone involved in running a shul much, much easier,” Barry said.

But for now it’s the apps that remain the heart of the brothers’ business. Through the smart Siddur, you can automatically sync the Jewish calendar with an iPhone or Apple computer’s secular iCalendar. “It brings the Jewish stuff into the secular calendar,” Ronnie said, summing up the feature and, inadvertently, the business.

ON SERMONIZING

Rabbi Jack Moline
Agudas Achim, Alexandria, Virginia

I’ve been at this 30 years, and for 20 of them there’s been some crisis around the holidays that demanded our attention. In 1993 when they had the signing of the Oslo agreement on the White House lawn we all had to rewrite our sermons. But there are very few things in this world that you have to consider if you’re going to be a Jew. One is God, one is Israel, and another is your relationship to the Jewish people. So it’s my responsibility when the largest number of people come together to be Jewish to raise all of those issues. People come to synagogue on the holidays for strengthening and introspection. They don’t need my opinion. They want orientation.

Rabbi David Wolpe
Sinai Temple, Los Angeles, California

The Palestinian statehood issue is this year’s crisis, but I’m not sure it’s fundamentally different from anything that’s gone before. My father began the holidays with the state of the Jewish world on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, and I’ve repeated that. And it seems to me that a great issue for human beings individually and for Israel as a country is to what extent you act on your own interest, and how much you act based on what other people think of you.

Rabbi Laura Geller
Temple Emanuel, Beverly Hills, California

Every year we have a contemporary-issues discussion on Yom Kippur afternoon. I have found that the advantage to doing it in that format is that you can bring in more than one voice, and it’s not a one-way conversation. Our theme this year is “coming home,” so the Yom Kippur forum will be framed in terms of coming home to Israel’s values in its Declaration of Independence, or in terms of asking whether Israel is our home enough to care what’s going on there. What responsibility do you have as a Jew to pay attention to Israel?

Rabbi Barry Freundel
Kesher Israel, Washington, D.C.

I do my year-in-review sermon on the second day of yontif. What I try to do is take the biggest issue of the year and discuss it with Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur eyes. But it’s a target in motion—because of the vote at the U.N., because we don’t know if there will be a new Intifada, because the old alliances are weakening, because the southern borders are less safe.

Rabbi Sidney Helbraun
Temple Beth-El, Northbrook, Illinois

I’m coming at it from both the standpoint of the Arab Spring and the internal movement in Israel. I heard a report on NPR a few weeks ago with a botanist who found out nitrogen can leach into plants directly through sedimentary rock, and that changes the whole nature of what people assumed about how botany works. And the researcher said, “Well, we have to throw out the textbooks.” The way science views changes of the status quo is that it’s very exciting, even if it uproots everything that your life’s work is about.

We’re always afraid of change. I’m one of the few rabbis from Chicago who did not vote for Obama but would today. He’s changed the dynamic after eight years of George Bush. Bush could not have been more in lockstep with Israel, but Gaza wound up with more missiles, and Israel wound up fighting a war.

ON ISRAEL

Rabbi Efrem Goldberg
Boca Raton Synagogue, Boca Raton, Florida

I feel like this is a pivotal time in Israel’s history. The honeymoon period where the world felt badly about the Holocaust and where people felt guilt and were willing to give Jews a pass has ended, and I think the world is returning to its animosity. We can disagree about policy all day long. If we are critical about Obama and the administration’s messaging on Israel, we need to be critical about our own messaging.

Moline: For too many people Israel has stopped being a value and become an issue instead. And the issues are always crises, which exacerbates the problem. It’s less important that we’re able to argue for or against settlements, or a unified Jerusalem, or a two-state solution than that we can make the case for Israel, period.

Geller: It is the function of the holidays and of a rabbi to remind people that Judaism is not just personal. It is a journey that happens among a people and brings us a connection to a particular place. And part of the challenge right now in North America is that for many liberal Jews, it isn’t.

Moline: It’s less to do with Israel per se than with a general disaffection with the institutions of Jewish life. But I’ve seen a polarization—people who are to the right are harder to the right, and people who are to the left are harder to the left. Maintaining the middle is very difficult.

Wolpe: Israel as a sovereign nation has to make its decisions based on internal considerations knowing that the world often judges it unfairly. But it’s dangerous for Israel to lose the sense that we have to care how the world sees us. Judaism recognizes the idea that a decent respect for mankind is a value—it’s called maras ayin. It is a Jewish value to care what other people think, and that Israel’s reputation in the world should not be a matter of indifference for us.

ON PALESTINIAN STATEHOOD AND THE ARAB SPRING

Freundel: On any issue you want to talk about, there are Jewish values, and most of the time what Judaism has to say doesn’t fall neatly into the Democratic or Republican side. So with the U.N. issue, I can talk about questions of international responsibility, and what allows you to be a player on the world stage, because there are examples in the Torah of nations that cannot. And there is in Jewish law discussions about covenants, and the two-sided nature of things—so while I don’t want to talk about policy, I can talk about attitudes in terms of how you look at people you’re in partnerships with.

Helbraun: We’re living in this world where everything is changing. Other religions are about control, but Judaism says no, we have to educate everyone, we have to give knowledge to the masses. And we’re seeing the ramifications of that—the Arab Spring is an example of people seeing they have power over their own lives. The question is how they’re going to exercise it. But you also see this generation in Israel that says, “We may not have power over the peace process, but we do have power over how we’re living our lives internally.” For decades people have said we’ll deal with religious-inclusion issues after we have peace. Well, waiting for peace is something none of us have control over, but there are other aspects of society that are 100 percent in our hands. So there’s also an awakening in the Israeli consciousness.

ON ISRAEL’S TENT-CITY PROTESTS

Rabbi Andy Bachman
Congregation Beth Elohim, Brooklyn, New York

We have hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the streets. That’s the largest Jewish protest movement for social justice in our lifetime. What is lost on American Jews is, hey, 6 million Jews live there and speak Hebrew every single day. There is a whole other Jewish reality going on.

Geller: It’s a watershed moment for Israel. It’s the Israeli Arab Spring, but it’s not clear where it’s going to lead—it’s easier to say, “We’re deposing a dictator” than “We’re reshaping society.” I think it’s a shift from the original vision of Israel to a different kind of social contract.

Goldberg: I use Israel as a springboard to get into questions of community. I wouldn’t tell Bibi what to do in the tent protests, but I can talk about what a reminder it is of Israel’s democracy that a quarter of a million people can protest housing prices while people in neighboring countries are gunned down for protesting in the street.

Bachman: I want to link it to the broader question of what ideas we have as a community about the organizing principles of our lives, and to what degree they translate into Jewish identity questions, and beyond that, to building a just society. I think it’s a really powerful opportunity to talk about Israel beyond the tried and true, and possibly alienating ways we engage in Israel.

But when Persian-American Jews sit down to celebrate, their tables will be laden with an abundance of symbolic foods. In fact, they call the Rosh Hashanah meal a Seder, and the Aramaic blessings they recite follow a particular order. Cookbook author Reyna Simnegar, whose beautiful book Persian Food From the Non-Persian Bride and Other Kosher Sephardic Recipes You Will Love came out earlier this year, says these customs originated more than 2,500 years ago.

“We first dip an apple in honey, then we tear a piece of leek—meaning to rip the enemy apart—and then throw the leek over our shoulder,” she said. Included on the table is fried zucchini, black-eyed peas, lamb’s head, tongue or a fish head, roasted beets, and dates. “In Iran the cooked lungs of a cow or lamb were used,” she told me. “But here, we put something fluffy like popcorn on the table.”

Even before the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E., Jews were living in Babylon, which would later become the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great. The Persian world offered a enormous variety of food. “When you ask for oranges, pistachios, spinach, or saffron, you are using words derived from the Persian,” said Najmieh Batmanglij, author of cookbooks like Food of Life and doyenne of Persian cooking in America, who noted that Persia was a great trading post in the ancient and medieval worlds. “The land was the first home of many common herbs, from basil to cilantro, and to scores of familiar preparations, including sweet and sour sauces and kebabs.”

As Persian Jews traveled, so did their food—a taste for meat with sweet and sour sauce, egg frittatas with greens called koukous, and especially rice. Jewish traders from Persia brought rice to ancient Israel at the time of the Second Temple. By the eighth century C.E., a network of Jewish traders called the Radhanites emerged and maintained international trade routes between the Christian and Islamic worlds. They combed the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean for new foods, furs, and spices. First described by the postmaster of the caliph of Baghdad in the ninth century, the Radhanites brought a revolutionary international trade network to the area, trading products like papyrus, textiles, wine, spices, and olive oil. Their four major trading routes began in Iberia or France and, each passing through various Jewish communities, ended in the silk route of China or India, 500 years before Marco Polo traveled east.

One Persian Jewish dish often served at Rosh Hashanah and Shabbat is gundi. Simnegar calls it the Persian matzoh ball. This large chickpea dumpling, made with either ground chicken, turkey, or beef, and flavored with turmeric, cardamom, and sometimes cumin, is cooked in chicken soup. For Persian Jews, the holidays would not be complete without it.

A series of chorosht—sweet and sour stews with meat, vegetables, and fruit—are also on the menu of festive Persian Jewish meals, along with a salad of fresh dill, cilantro, scallions, and radishes. But the centerpiece is usually a variation of perfectly cooked rice, served with a crispy tadiq, or crust. Like pasta for Italians, rice sets the standard for a Persian cook.

The story of how Simnegar came to write about Persian cuisine is a fascinating one. Born in Venezuela, she spent her early years as a Catholic and discovered her family’s converso past as an adolescent. She moved to Los Angeles to study at UCLA, and while there she met her husband, Sammy, a Persian Jew. Simnegar’s mother-in-law was the one who taught her the lexicon of Persian Jewish cooking, which she serves today to her five small children. I promise you that her quince stew with veal, served with Persian rice and decorated with carrots and oranges, will enhance your Rosh Hashanah table. These dishes serve as a wonderful reminder of how Jewish traders centuries ago made the culinary world smaller. As they moved so did their recipes and traditions, enhancing Jewish tables for generations to come.

Which makes it especially inconvenient that, this year, Rosh Hashanah begins at sundown on Wednesday, September 28, smack in the middle of that second period of General Debate. Moreover, unlike most two-day Jewish holidays, of which Israelis celebrate only the first days, observance of Rosh Hashanah extends all the way to sundown that Friday.

What would happen should Israel’s diplomats need to be executing their jobs on the yom tov? “The Israeli government and its representatives observe all national and Jewish holidays,” Gil Lainer, consul for media and public affairs at the Consulate General of Israel in New York, told Tablet Magazine. “Any and all exceptions are made on a case-by-case basis when deemed necessary.” A couple weeks ago, Defense Minister Ehud Barak broke Shabbat to make a (successful) intervention into a burgeoning crisis with Egypt. One imagines a unilateral Palestinian statehood drive would qualify as similarly extenuating. And, anyway, we hear that it is the former period, from September 21-23, that is expected to be most eventful for the Jewish state.

Earlier: Palestinian Move a Go, Followed By …

U.N. spokesperson Farhan Haq explained to me that, in each country, U.N. employees get ten paid holidays, with the ten days left up to the host countries (so in Russia, for example, they get Eastern Orthodox Christmas, or January 7, off). In New York, though, holidays have been decided by the votes of all member countries—in other words, of the General Assembly—and the ten holidays they have come up with are: New Year’s Day (January 1), President’s Day, Good Friday, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Eid ul-Fitr, Eid al-Adha (which commemorates Abraham’s refusal to sacrifice Ishmael—yes, to them it’s Ishmael, not Isaac), Thanksgiving, and Christmas (Western). No Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, though—and this in New York, where even the schools (though not the city) have the day off!

Honestly, though, while the small number of explicitly Jewish nations (one) in the General Assembly has at various times led to some pretty nasty things, this clear is not driven by animosity. Anyway, Jewish employees will get one day of Rosh Hashanah off to spend in observance, and, like most other Jews, can take the other one off themselves. Muslim employees (like Haq, as he noted to me) get Eid to observe. And Christian employees? They just get the day off. But we’re used to them catching the breaks.

Our New Year is about reflection and reassessment. Even those two words tell us we’re supposed to look back as much as we look forward—look at the “re,” telling us to turn around, to stop charging full speed ahead. And in another example of the way language informs what we do, we spend the holiday hoping to be inscribed in the book of life: two words—book, inscription—that speak of permanence. Inscribed books are weighty and lasting—they have historicity. They do not yell “whoo!”

On Rosh Hashanah, lots of us—even people who don’t spend a lot of time in shul or hunched over Jewish texts—make the effort to get to a synagogue. The tunes and prayer-poems are familiar; they’re the same every year. We sing Avinu Malkeynu, asking God to forgive our sins. The refrain is repeated so frequently that it’s easy to sing along. It’s repetitive and dirge-like, and you don’t need to know Hebrew to fall into its rhythm. We await the blowing of the shofar: The sound and the visuals couldn’t be more primal and ancient. Rosh Hashanah’s liturgy is full of descriptions of humans as meaningless little nothings cowering before the Almighty. Even if you don’t subscribe to the old-school version of the smiting Heavenly Father, the king on a throne of judgment, the text is consistent and almost reassuring. Here we are, standing with our community, sniveling in one voice. There’s no narcissism involved.

We do this every year.

But on a secular New Year, repetitiveness is the last thing we want. New Year’s Eve is when we’re supposed to go out, make the scene—and if the scene is somewhere hot and new and exclusive, so much the better. Our resolutions, too, are all about the new. They’re about hurling ourselves forward, full of superhero-like determination to become new. We swear to lose weight, to quit smoking, to find a new job, to get organized. We throw ourselves into our new, new, new lives, only to sputter out by February.

A key difference between the secular and sacred New Years is in the way each looks at time. The secular year is linear; it’s about shooting forward, like an arrow. Looking back only slows you down. That’s part of the American psyche, too. No regrets. Onward and upward. Excelsior.

But Jewish time isn’t linear. It’s circular. The same rituals, melodies, and objects scroll by again and again. They’re like a Torah being rewound or a Viewmaster clicking through familiar, tiny images over and over again. It’s not our tradition to swear to change our external selves on Rosh Hashanah; we look in rather than out. And we look back, thinking of the ways we’ve missed the mark over the past year and resolving to try to be more moral people. We don’t steamroll over our feelings of regret and embarrassment—which is what American culture generally wants us to do. Don’t dwell, our day-to-day world says. Move on. But we Jews don’t play that. We dwell. We examine our flaws as if they were scabs, and then we pick at them. We know we have to apologize to other people. We know we have to think about how to be better people. And we know that better people doesn’t mean shinier, glossier people, but rather more thoughtful people.

On New Year’s Eve, we see ourselves as failures for making the same resolution every year; once again I failed to become a size 6, I failed to learn Spanish, I failed to find love. But on Rosh Hashanah, our samenesses aren’t regarded as failings. We know everything is cyclical. Wanting to be inscribed in the book of life and thinking about what we have to apologize for are what we do every year. Every year we know we’ll have to apologize and take stock. It’s almost a relief. We’re not expected to reinvent ourselves; we’re just supposed to try to be our best selves.

This is a good lesson for parents. The secular New Year’s model really doesn’t work for parenting. It isn’t useful to vow to go fully organic, enroll the kids in violin classes, eliminate white flour, and help with homework every single night. We can’t sustain this fervor of “I will be an entirely different parent.” But the cyclic nature of Rosh Hashanah, the familiarity of the texts and sounds and the soothing childhood taste of apples and honey and the familiar, alarming spongy texture of honeycake and the kind of self-examination this holiday encourages—those are more useful models for parents to emulate. Can we do a little better? Can we remember what it felt like to be a kid? Can we appreciate who our children actually are, right here and right now, while we think about how to be the best parents to them—not some idealized version of our children, but our actual children?

My Rosh Hashanah won’t be all that different from last year’s. My husband and I will negotiate who watches the kids when, how we’ll juggle the family service and adult prayer and reflection time. We’ll spend time with my family. My kids will make construction-paper daisy chains, writing on each link the qualities they hope to encourage in themselves in the coming year. We’ll throw bread into the Hudson River. We’ll read New Year at the Pier, How the Rosh Hashanah Challah Became Round, and Sammy Spider’s First Rosh Hashanah.

But our Sammy Spider years are coming to an end; I figure we have only one or two more holiday cycles to go through with the inquisitive arachnid. The books will be passed on to another, younger family. But not just yet. This year, we’ll be stringing Apple Jacks and Honey Nut Cheerios onto cords, making edible “apple and honey” necklaces—my mom’s idea, something new. Little, thoughtful, incremental changes are doable, and more sustainable than unrealistic vows to tear everything up and launch ourselves headlong into an all-new world.

Have a good, sweet year.

Those questions may appear nebulous, simultaneously too elusive and too deep for anyone to attempt to answer seriously. But look at the landscape of Jewish life and two broad currents suggest themselves, two divergent agendas that address much more than the question of conversion alone. On the one hand, those who imagine Judaism as an exclusive enterprise advocate that the religion and its followers alike should move in ever-diminishing circles, orbiting around a small nucleus of rabbis entrusted with parsing the halachic laws. This approach is not without its merits; trying to make sense of an ancient faith in a modern world is a mighty and baffling task, and the drive inward, toward purity and certainty, is both instinctive and immensely reassuring.

But those of us who believe that Judaism’s survival also depends on its ability to adapt to the spiritual and practical challenges imposed by modernity must reject the urge to narrow our common horizons. Instead, we must examine our boundaries and beliefs and work to welcome new people, new traditions, and new ideas into the fold. To some, such talk may have the airy, hollow ring of universalist New Age spirituality. But that is not the case—as we think will be clear from the collection of essays by rabbis and writers, scholars and cooks, comedians and community leaders in Tablet Magazine’s High Holiday package. Some of these articles and essays are personal, others historical. In them, we hope each reader will find his or her own path toward answering Judaism’s essential questions, impossible and beautiful and all-encompassing—the only questions worth asking.

Judaism’s greatest sages have always plunged into the depths of doubt in an effort to find morsels of wisdom. This holiday season, two of our contributors evoke the memories of such men: Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, in an essay coming tomorrow, writes about Hillel the Elder, who defined Jewish peoplehood in radically inclusive terms, and Rodger Kamenetz recalls his journey to commune with the spirit of the late Nachman of Bratslav, a 19th-century rabbi who made his home among the non-believers in the hope of showing them the merits of faith.

These rabbis—and other, less illustrious but no less righteous men and women throughout history—embody Judaism’s finest qualities. As their respective communities sought solace and comfort in closed doors and closed minds, they ventured out and struggled to expand the boundaries of peoplehood, occasionally disregarding the letter in service of the spirit. It is doubt, they realized, that makes the believer’s faith more meaningful, and it is compassion for others that makes one’s understanding of oneself more complete. Armed with these convictions, they engaged with the world; more than any enforcer of strict rules or arbiter of stern edicts, they taught us what it means to be Jewish.

As we approach Rosh Hashanah, we would do well to abandon the pointless fights that have embroiled so many of us for so long, and to insist instead that there are other, better, more urgent questions for us to be asking. We must ask how we can invite as many newcomers to partake in Judaism—as those interviewed by Joan Nathan for her food column have done—without eroding the religion’s core tenets. We must ask what forms of innovative communal structures we might erect to serve the needs of those whom consequences placed just outside the reach of tradition’s grasp, as Rabbi Andy Bachman does in a Vox Tablet podcast about, of all things, burial customs.

Most important, we must ask which of our beliefs guide us forward and which are merely vantage points to the past. And we must do so without turning denominational divides into weapons of divisiveness. In the course of recent American Jewish history, Reform and Conservative rabbis have sometimes preferred strict interpretations of Jewish law, while Orthodox rabbis have allowed room for ambiguity. Indeed, it is the Orthodox rabbi Avi Shafran who here reminds us of the inherent dangers of generalizations and collective judgments, a shortcoming from which Jews of all stripes are not immune.

Unlike Passover or Purim, Rosh Hashanah has no haggadah or megillah, no seminal text that invites us to ponder the meaning of the holiday. It is up to us to stir up debate, to ask what traditions still matter and what should be reconsidered. We hope you’ll find kindling for conversation in the articles and other content we’re publishing this week. And even if not, at the very least try the pomegranate martini.

Shanah tova, from everyone at Tablet Magazine.

You can also come see the band in concert (and say hi to me! I’ll be introducing them!) on September 26th, at 11 am, at the Tablet Magazine/JDub/Congregation Beth Elohim Sukkot street fair in Park Slope, Brooklyn (on Garfield Place between 8th Avenue and Prospect Park West).

Now is also a good time to mention that Tablet Magazine (and The Scroll) will not be publishing new content during Rosh Hashanah—or during Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Shemini Atzeret, and Simchat Torah.

Personally, I’m a fan of that policy, and not (only) for the time off/saved vacation days it gives me: I think it is a compelling and potent statement about the magazine’s editorial priorities. Which is why, even though this event is “part ritual,” I question whether the magazine’s sponsorship is undercutting that statement. But maybe folks think I am being nitpicky? Or maybe people think we should be publishing during Jewish holidays? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Learning about food traditions is a major challenge in every mixed marriage, but perhaps more so when one partner is Jewish and the other must learn from scratch how to navigate both kashrut and the culinary customs that characterize the cycle of holidays that kicks off anew next week, with Rosh Hashanah.

“When you grow up outside the tradition you don’t know the holidays,” said Colleen Fain, 63, a community volunteer in Coral Gables, Florida, who converted to Judaism when she got married more than 40 years ago. “You have to learn the rituals, and it’s hard to pass that down when you are not familiar or comfortable with them. The convert has to work really hard to understand the customs so they unify the family.”

For Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks, 54, who converted when she married writer Tony Horwitz, Judaism was a natural progression. “I didn’t know any Jews growing up,” Brooks said over a glass of wine on the porch of her Victorian home on Martha’s Vineyard, far from Australia, where she was born and raised. “For some reason my father was a lefty Zionist Socialist who got caught up with the Zionist movement, even though we were not Jewish. It rubbed off on me.” As a teenager, Brooks started wearing a star of David because “of my rabid history reading, especially about the Shoah to express identification with the Jewish people.” Conversion seemed “like the natural thing to do,” she said. It was a move “much more about history than faith, I wasn’t going to be the end of the line of a faith that survived so many years.”

Brooks knew Jewish deli food in New York and Ashkenazic cooking from Tony’s family, but she likes the Middle Eastern cuisine of Israel best. “When I lived in Cairo as a writer, I kept visiting Israel and loved the Levantine-inspired food,” she said. For breaking the fast after Yom Kippur, she goes Sephardic, sometimes serving Poopa Dweck’s Syrian brisket with fruit from her cookbook Aromas of Aleppo and other times harira, a rich Moroccan lamb-based vegetable soup often used to break the fast during Ramadan, which she first tasted when she was in Morocco in the late 1980s. “It was the only thing that got me up in the morning,” she said. “You feel like you have been fed with that.”

Brooks speaks passionately about cooking. When she doesn’t get challah from her son’s class at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center, where the students make it, she bakes it herself. “I like to get my hands in the dough, and I get some of my best novelistic ideas when making challah,” she said. “I chew over the issues from my morning’s writing and sometimes gnarly plot points resolve themselves. Turning the compost works well too.”

Tom Ashe similarly follows the Jewish rituals of his spouse, Joanne. The son of a police officer from Queens, Ashe converted when he married Joanne 33 years ago. The couple cooks together (during the holidays he plays the role of assistant; the rest of the time he’s in charge) and rarely host fewer than 10 family members on weekends in their home in Placitas, New Mexico. “Since I am a convert, each holiday brings back memories of when I was in my mid-20s and chose Judaism,” said Ashe, 58, a real estate developer. “They are definitely my holidays too, and I look forward to the foods, the smells, and the traditions. The Jewish palate is more eclectic than what I grew up with as a young Protestant boy in Queens. Jews have the whole world, from Middle Eastern to Asian foods.”

Although the Ashes still pull out Joanne’s mother’s recipes for the holidays, they occasionally tweak dishes, as in a delicious smoked brisket holiday recipe more reminiscent of the far West than Eastern Europe.

Veronica Goode knew nothing about Jewish customs growing up in Venezuela and had to learn everything—from Shabbat candle-lighting rules to what ingredients to include in a holiday meal. “Cooking Jewish is a real shock,” said Goode, 36, a social work student in Washington, D.C. “When I got married, I didn’t know how to cook anything Jewish, even brisket, so I called my step mother-in-law.” Veronica now makes her recipes with lots of onions, tomato paste, and long cooking. Her one complaint: “I haven’t learned to make matzoh balls yet.”

Goode underlined a lament I have heard from many converts I meet at book signings and other events. Judaism is intimidating, and they need a gentle soul to mentor them through the traditions.

“The best thing to do is to ask friends and relatives for recipes and don’t be afraid to try them,” said Fain. When she first wanted to make kugel, for example, she asked her sister-in-law, Sally Ann Epstein, who had a family recipe from a cousin for help. Fain was not afraid to ask, Epstein was flattered, and now making that kugel—a dairy version more appropriate for a break-fast—is a family tradition. “If I had married someone else, I wouldn’t know how to make kugel or brisket,” she said.

Imagine life without that!

HARIRA (MOROCCAN VEGETABLE SOUP)
Adapted from Geraldine Brooks

2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 large onions, diced (about 4 cups)
3 cloves garlic, crushed
2-inch knob of ginger, peeled and grated
3 celery stalks, diced
3 medium carrots, peeled and cut in rounds
2 zucchini, diced
8 cups good lamb, beef, or vegetable stock
12-ounce can crushed tomatoes
1 19-ounce can chick peas,
1 cup barley
1 cup chopped fresh mint
2 cups chopped fresh cilantro
1 teaspoon cardamom or to taste
1 teaspoon cumin or to taste
Pinch of saffron
Salt to taste
¼ teaspoon white pepper or to taste
1 teaspoon hot red pepper or to taste
1/2 teaspoon black pepper or to taste
½ cup vermicelli noodles, broken up

1. Heat the oil in a heavy-bottomed soup pot and sauté the onions, garlic, ginger, celery, carrots, and zucchini for a few minutes.

2. Add the broth and the tomatoes and bring to a boil. Then continue to simmer for another 20 minutes.

3. Add the chick peas and the barley, half the mint and half the cilantro, the cardamom, cumin, saffron, salt, and the three kinds of pepper. Continue to simmer, uncovered, for 20 minutes, adding 1 to 2 cups water or as needed.

4. Add the vermicelli and continue simmering about 5 minutes or until the pasta is cooked. Stir in the remaining mint and cilantro. Adjust the seasonings to taste and serve.

Yield: 10 to 12 Servings

BARBECUED SMOKED BRISKET
Adapted from Tom and Joanne Ashe

5- to 6-pound Grade-A choice brisket
6 sliced garlic cloves
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
3 sliced onions
¼ cup liquid smoke
1 bottle Heinz Chili Sauce
1 16-ounce can tomatoes
1 8-ounce can tomato sauce
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 cup of wine or enough to nearly cover the brisket

1. Wash and dry the brisket and preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Pierce holes in the brisket and insert the garlic cloves. Sprinkle with salt and freshly ground pepper to taste. Heat the oil and sear on both sides.

3. Put the onions on the bottom of a heavy casserole, just large enough to hold the brisket. Put the brisket on top and then add the liquid smoke, chili sauce, tomatoes, and tomato sauce and pour over the brisket. Cover with the red wine.

4. Cover with tin foil or a top and bake in the oven for 4 hours.

5. Chill overnight, remove fat that has accumulated, slice, reheat and serve.

Yield: about 10 servings

Fain family noodle kugel, as prepared by Joan Nathan.
Gabriela Herman

FAIN FAMILY NOODLE KUGEL
Adapted from Colleen Fain, Sally Ann Epstein, and Bobbi Mayer Joslin

8 ounces broad, flat, egg noodles
½ cup sugar
12 ounces whole milk cottage cheese
1/2 cup milk or a little more
1/2 cup salted butter, melted, but not hot
1/2 cup golden raisins
2 large eggs, slightly beaten 1 cup sour cream
½ teaspoon cinnamon or to taste

1. Preheat the oven to 350-degrees and grease an 8-cup casserole.

2. Cook the noodles in a large pot of salted water and drain, then rinse to cool down a little.

3. Mix the sugar, cottage cheese, milk, melted butter, raisins, eggs, and sour cream in a large bowl. Stir in the noodles, transfer to casserole dish and liberally sprinkle the cinnamon on top.

4. Bake for 40 minutes until browned on top. If you use a flat casserole you will need slightly less time for cooking.

Yield: about 8 servings

Joan Nathan’s forthcoming book, Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France, is due out this fall.

To further get you into the holiday spirit, the guys behind God & Co. put together an advice-rap. Enjoy.

Rosh Hashana Rap from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

Beet Carpaccio With Wild Arugula, Goat Cheese, and Orange Vinaigrette

1 pound large loose beets, golden, red and/or candy striped
4 cups wild arugula
¼ cup goat cheese, crumbled
1 orange, segmented and juiced, separated
1 tablespoon good quality local honey
¼ cup olive oil
¼ teaspoon sea salt
¼ teaspoon black pepper

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

1. De-stem and scrub beets. Wrap in foil and place on a sheet tray. Bake for 50 minutes or until tender. Transfer to a bowl, cover with saran wrap, and refrigerate for at least two hours.

2. After beets have cooled, peel all beets. On a mandoline or slicer, slice beets very thinly. This may be done with a knife, but will take a little longer. Keep all different color beets separate so that the color does not bleed.

3. Arrange beets in concentric circles in any pattern you wish on a serving platter.

4. To make the dressing, combine the orange juice (1/3 cup) and honey, whisk in the olive oil, and season with salt and pepper. Reserve.

5. Right before serving, toss arugula in the reserved dressing and place in the center of arranged beets. Top with crumbled goat cheese and orange segments. Serve immediately.

Yield: 4 servings

Honey Glazed Striped Bass With Fresh Herb, Cucumber, and Pomegranate Salad

4 4-ounce pieces fillets of striped bass, skin on
4 teaspoons honey
½ teaspoon sea salt
½ teaspoon and pepper
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 cup cucumber, julienned
¼ cup chopped chives
¼ cup basil leaves
¼ cup chervil leaves
¼ cup parsley leaves
¼ cup pomegranate seeds
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

1. In a medium bowl, combine cucumbers, chives, basil, chervil, parsley, and pomegranate seeds. Season with salt and pepper and set aside.

2. On a baking sheet lined with foil, season fish fillets with salt and pepper.

3. In a large non-stick or anodized pan over medium high heat, add the olive oil. Swirl the oil to coat the entire pan. Add the fillets skin side down and allow to cook for 3 minutes. Do not move the fillets around, you want a caramelized crust on the bottom. After 2 minutes, drizzle the fish with honey.

4. Flip the fillets and cook an additional 3 minutes or until golden brown and caramelized. Transfer fillets back to the baking sheet.

5. Bake the fillets for 5 minutes or until cooked throughout. This will differ depending on thickness of fish fillets.

6. Drizzle the herb salad with olive oil and toss.

7. To serve, transfer the bass to a serving platter and top with the herb salad.

Yield: 4 servings

Pomegranate Molasses, Cinnamon, and Chive Pan-Seared Lamb Chops

8 lamb loin chops, 1.5 to 2 inches in thickness
¼ cup pomegranate molasses
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon sea or kosher salt
1½ teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons chopped chives
¼ cup pomegranate seeds
2 tablespoons olive oil

Preheat oven to 375 degrees and line a baking sheet with foil, set aside.

1. In a large bowl, combine pomegranate molasses, cinnamon, salt, and pepper to form a paste. Rub paste on each lamb hop and allow to marinate for up to 2 hours.

2. In a large non-stick sauté pan or grill pan, heat 1 tablespoon olive oil over medium heat. Once oil is hot, but not smoking, add 4 lamb chops and sear for 2 minutes on each side or until a crust forms. The pomegranate molasses has a high sugar content, so be careful not to overcook the chops at this point or the crust will easily turn into a burnt one. After searing the chops on the second side, transfer seared chops to foil lined baking sheet. Wipe sauté or grill pan clean with a paper towel and repeat with remaining 1 tablespoon oil and 4 lamb chops. This step may be done ahead of time.

3. Once chops are seared, transfer baking sheet to preheated oven. Depending on the thickness of lamb and the desired degree of doneness, cooking time will differ. For rare, an internal temperature of 120 degrees and approximately 5 minutes cooking time. For medium rare, an internal temperature of 130 degrees and approximately 7 minutes cooking time. For medium, an internal temperature of 140 degrees and 9 minutes cooking time.

4. Once lamb chops are cooked to desired doneness, transfer lamb to a platter and garnish with chives and pomegranate seeds and serve!

Yield: 4 servings

Jews belong to the oldest book club in the world, and we’ve been dissolving time forever in our old stories, rereading them every week for thousands of years. Why do we do it? Rabbi Nachman, our great tale teller, said stories are meant to heal the soul. And in truth, five years ago, when I thought I was a homeless man, I found soul comfort in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and in stories of the rabbis, too.

My wife and I were traveling up north when Hurricane Katrina struck, and after the shocking failure of the federal levees, we sat in a cheesy hotel room in New York City drinking scotch and watching television coverage of our fragile city flooding. We were desperate for specifics. Was our home underwater?

A week later, my father died in a Florida nursing home. His body was brought home to Baltimore, where he raised me. We sat shiva at my brother’s house. A rabbi walked up to me and said, “You have lost your home.” I said yes, I think so. He said, “God is also homeless. He lost his ‘home’ because his children quarreled.” I knew he meant the story the rabbis tell, how we Jews lost the House of God because of “groundless hatred.”

God is homeless. That was a comfort somehow. Maybe my losses were part of a bigger story than I knew.

But I still hadn’t seen my home.

The TV showed journalists getting past the checkpoints. So my wife and I ginned up a press pass at a copy shop, and got an editor friend to sign it before we returned to New Orleans. Worked like a charm.

Our lawn was full of rack from Lake Pontchartrain. But our house was just high enough off the ground to escape the flood that took the homes of so many of our dear friends. A 130-mile-an-hour wind blew off half the house’s old roof slates. All I could think about was recovering that roof. I felt so exposed. We all did then.

There were only 10,000 people in New Orleans, and no slate roofers. So I found a company in Baton Rouge to help. Twice their truck was turned away at the checkpoints by the National Guard. They wouldn’t try again unless I came and accompanied them at 4 in the morning.

Somehow I persuaded the guard to let us pass. The roofers climbed my roof to apply the magical felt. In the dawn sky, I could see the outline of the new moon, the morning of the Jewish New Year. Three white heron rowed high above us, majestic, pure, and timeless. They were celebrating the birthday of creation—for the New Year is the birthday of the whole world.

Piles of torn branches baked in the hot sun up and down the street, and rough winds blew past our dry wooden houses. Fires broke out all over the city. On the way to the synagogue, we heard a fire alarm that no one was answering and saw smoke from a mansion off of St. Charles Avenue. Later we learned it had burned to the ground.

The Rosh Hashanah service was held in a packed little chapel. We sat in the anteroom on folding chairs. I couldn’t see the rabbi, but I heard the shofar. As I’d heard the soft friction of the heron wings beating, for the city was so quiet that morning, God was whispering.

We were in the first lines of Genesis: light, darkness, and the first winged creatures.

We roamed the empty streets in the days of awe. Amid shuttered shops, an open one sold ice cream—in one, exquisite flavor: “violet.” I spoke to a policeman who had waded through hell; we were all survivors. I spoke to everybody; there were no divides. Post-Katrina we were all like Jews who share a common history of catastrophe. Every conversation started with the same question: How did you make it through the storm?

In time the wild heron gave way to the inhabitants trickling back. Our street ceased to be a flyway, but we still had no mail service for a year. But we had our local newspaper. We felt abandoned, no longer part of the United States. I scanned the Internet by sitting outside shuttered cafes, then one reopened, and we gathered to be human. One morning in March, I read in the paper. A domestic dispute: The first murder. Cain slew Abel. We were moving deeper into Genesis.

And where are we now, five years later? There’s no single story. Many of us are still in Exodus, wandering far from home. Our Pharaoh is the Army Corps of Engineers, indifferent to God or Congress, and two years late on a project to protect the city. We’ve known the plagues of Egypt from coffin flies, to flood and fire, and bad government at every level. Now BP’s oil plagues our waters. Even before that insult, the marsh was dying of saltwater intrusion from countless cuts from oil company canals. The coast that protects New Orleans is drifting into open water—a football field vanishes every half-hour. We have seven years to save it, and nothing urgent being done. Just plans without funding.

We’ve had lots of plans, liked the detailed plans for the tabernacle that fill the last half of Exodus and the first half of Leviticus. We still haven’t built a place where God and man can meet. Our previous mayor promised “cranes in the sky,” but mainly he made plans. Our new mayor just announced 100 projects to be built right away. And I even believe him. Maybe at least we’ve reached the second part of Numbers, where the journey to Canaan resumes.

What story will be told in the end? Will we loiter at the edge like Moses on Mt. Nebo, or will all of us New Orleanians finally make it to the land of our promise?

Personally right now, I feel at home and homeless, feel the joy and the ruin, the loss and the courage, the sorrow of so many victims in exile, the hate and the love.

Some days I tire of all the stories. Then I dream of moving backward in time. They say it’s impossible but I don’t know. God is not homeless in my dreams. After five years in post-Katrina New Orleans, this New Year I want to go back where all the stories begin, look up in the sky, and see three heron fly.

Rodger Kamenetz lives in New Orleans, where he works as a dream therapist. His next book, Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka, will be published in October as part of the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.

I would make a joke, but I can’t improve on Andrew Silow-Carroll’s. “Wait,” he wrote, “I thought Rosh Hashanah WAS a fashion show.”

We were in Uman at the request of Reb Nachman of Breslov, who lived from 1772 to 1810, and who bid his followers to spend Rosh Hashanah each year at his grave. Though the Hasidim who have claimed him as their spiritual leader were almost entirely obliterated in the Holocaust, the movement began reconstituting itself in the late 1960s, and with the fall of the Soviet Union 20 years ago, an increasing number of ultra-Orthodox Jews have made the trek here. For one weekend out of the year, Uman again becomes an enclave of Jewish observance, with a hotel, dozens of prayer sites—including the courtyards of apartment buildings, streets, and alleyways—and an open-air bazaar catering to the assembled pilgrims.

My guide through this perplexing adventure was my first cousin, Avraham Chaim Bloomenstiel, who at age 30 works as a Hasidic rabbi, Torah scribe, and business consultant in Dallas. Like me, Avi grew up in the tiny, vigorously assimilationist Jewish community of rural Louisiana. Along parallel lines, he and I have created radically different cultures for ourselves, signified in my case by the three-button black suit, only eight years out of fashion, that I wear at academic conferences and religious services, and in Avi’s case by the regalia that hasn’t gone out of style since the followers of the Baal Shem Tov created Hasidism in the 18th century.

Admittedly, I find it curious that Avi has chosen to become a Hasid—and I’m not the only family member to feel that way—yet it is no more outlandish than my decision to study Yiddish and attempt to create a modern Yiddish-speaking family. We have each staked our identity in a culture defined by a distant place and an absent time: his in the Ukrainian shtetl of two centuries ago, mine in Jewish metropolises such as Warsaw and New York only a hundred years later. And yet for each of us, this position is not a retreat from the present; our choices offer a means of self-assertion, and they reconfigure the dislocations we experienced moving from our oddly shtetl-like origins in the Deep South into the world at large. Over the weekend, Avi and I discussed how isolated our upbringing was in some respects yet how much we have carried of that experience in our subsequent wanderings. Though we came of age at the end of the 20th century, vestiges of an older culture and sensibility still characterize small-town life in Louisiana. It comes as no surprise that we now identify with cultures rooted in the past, yet full of Jewish content we had lacked at home. Both Hasidim and academics are rooted in tiny enclaves, just as Jews in Louisiana are; both today are globally mobile and multilingual, as most people in Louisiana are not.

External differences notwithstanding, Avi and I remain affectionately, delightfully mishpokhe: we wax enthusiastic over the newly kosher-certified Café du Monde in New Orleans; we trade unexpurgated stories about our flamboyant, profane relatives; we share many of the same diverse musical tastes; and our speech veers among the Yiddish and Hebrew seasonings of Orthodox discourse, academic English, and native Southern idiom.

Reb Nachman is an appropriate object of our respective devotion: the great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, he was a child prodigy—memorizing the Book of Psalms by age eight, mastering rabbinic and kabbalistic sources by his early teens—who seemed destined to galvanize Hasidism as it moved into the 19th century. But by the time of his death from tuberculosis, Reb Nachman had alienated many of his followers with his cryptic teachings and had started turf wars with older Hasidic rebbes. Instead of the unifier of early Hasidism, he was the founder of one of its smaller and more dissident sects, whose members are now known as Breslovers.

About a century after Reb Nachman created a religious movement, he became a folk hero to many secular Jews. His struggles with revelation, truth, and religious authority placed him in an unlikely pantheon with such figures as Shabbtai Zevi and Spinoza, whose company the actual Reb Nachman would never have welcomed. The erratic content of his preachings, veering between ecstatic embrace of nature and existential anxiety over God’s silence, offered an equally unlikely religious imprimatur for Jewish agnosticism. And his fragmentary, fantastic stories provided a blueprint for Yiddish and Hebrew modernists such as Y.L. Peretz, Der Nister, and S.Y. Agnon.

My journey to Uman began on the Thursday afternoon before Rosh Hashanah, in the Zurich airport, where a handful of observant Jews gathered awaiting the flight to Kiev. The matter-of-fact character of traditional Jewish culture, in which the boundary between sacred and profane is routinely trespassed, seemed on first contact to be absent among most of these Breslovers, who as baalei tshuvah—Jews who, like Avi, became religious as adults—are not traditional: for them, every act of prayer or religious devotion is an existential confrontation, a potential spiritual drama. It was going to be a long weekend.

After a two-and-a-half hour flight, we arrived in Ukraine. During the three-hour taxi ride from Kiev to Uman, the driver entertained himself with contemporary Slavic pop—my cousin recognized a Ukrainian cover of Prince’s “When Doves Cry”—laced with English-language hip-hop interjections more profane than would be broadcast in America. When we arrived in Uman, we walked down Pushkin Street, a main drag for visiting Hasidim, to our rented apartment; already dense crowds of young men had gathered to dance ecstatically to Hebrew-language Breslover disco, which would have merged seamlessly with what we had heard on the radio. After unpacking, my cousin took me to the promenade to look at books for sale—“nothing new this year,” he said, disappointed—and to recite evening prayers at the main synagogue, near where Reb Nachman is buried. Though there were enough jetlagged men congregated to make the requisite quorum, the vast sanctuary, filled with rows of light-brown desks and pews, but otherwise pristinely white, seemed deserted yet expectant of the fervent celebration to follow the next day. This would be the last time we could find a seat there.

On Friday morning, my cousin pointed out a relatively new custom at Uman: a mass recitation of tikkun ha-klali, a liturgy of 10 psalms that Reb Nachman designated as effective for penitence. The spectacle from our balcony of thousands of Jewish men swaying and responding to scriptural verses recited by loudspeaker offered a panorama of groups represented: young, white-draped charismatics chanting “Na-Nach-Nachman” at slightest provocation; sober, black-yarmulked men otherwise indistinguishable from any other Orthodox congregation; and decked-out Hasidim like Avi.

Given the size and diversity of crowds represented at Uman—old-school Breslovers mingling freely with Satmars and Lubavitchers, Yemenites, Ethiopians, French-speaking North Africans, Na-Nach hippies, and even historically anti-Hasidic yeshiva types—nearly all of whom conduct their own prayer services in addition to gathering at the main shul and at Reb Nachman’s grave, it seems that Reb Nachman’s teachings and Breslov Hasidism have never been stronger in the Orthodox world than they are today.

Moreover, given its diversity the Uman pilgrimage offers a model for intergroup cooperation: rival movements like Satmar and Lubavitch live harmoniously one weekend a year, without having to sacrifice their individual identity to do so.

Later Friday morning I plunged into the panorama while shopping at the makeshift kosher mini-market: not even 15 years of studying Yiddish descriptions of the shtetl marketplace prepared me for the chaos at the checkout counter. Sensing my outsider’s bewilderment, the cashier apologized to me in Hebrew for the disorder. I was touched by his gesture. Outside, a frail, one-armed Jewish octogenarian dressed in festooned military uniform stood in the middle of the road describing his heroic deeds on behalf of Stalin’s army to Israeli Hasidic teenagers who offered him blessings in Yiddish while placing American dollars in his hand. Dollars were indeed the universal currency last weekend; no one accepted Ukrainian Hryvnias—the five-hryvnia note bears an image of the 17th-century pogromist Bogdan Chmelnitski—or even euros, currently more valuable than American money. Yet all the local shopkeepers could haggle in rudimentary Hebrew more readily than in English.

Part of the drama of our preparations for the holiday was Avi’s effort to go to one of the city’s two mikvehs, ritual baths, before services begin; each time we went, it was too crowded for us to make the requisite immersion, a fact that frustrated him more than it did me. (He eventually went Saturday morning.) At the main sanctuary that afternoon the crowd was standing-room-only and we found ourselves pushed against the pews by another row of participants standing between us and the seats behind, like in a New York subway at rush hour. The next morning we tried a different synagogue, which again disappointed Avi because this group didn’t sing the traditional Breslov melodies. It was crowded there, too, but at least there were seats for us during the roughly seven-hour service. On Sunday I went with another of Avi’s friends staying in our apartment—there were nine of us, including three young boys, crowded into a three-bedroom space, a typical arrangement here—to the Lubavitch services, which met in a tent and attracted perhaps 100 people. The single mystical moment that I experienced during the weekend occurred there: although blessings over the Torah are auctioned off at most services, a typical custom among the ultra-Orthodox, I don’t bid on the first blessing. Yet when the time came for cohanim, members of the priestly caste, to bless the whole congregation, a man looked at me and motioned to come wash our hands in preparation for the ritual. Later I asked him how he knew I was a cohen. “You just had that look about you,” he said.

Sunday night, after Rosh Hashanah, Avi explained from our window how Breslov culture constitutes itself: on the main drag, the Na-Nachs dance to Breslover pop until they wear out; in front of the main synagogue the older Hasidim and their disciples dance to traditional klezmer music before commemorating the destruction of the Temple with tears and psalms, then recite the morning liturgy at the earliest permitted moment. What worries Avi about the new enthusiasts is their pursuit of frenzy to the point of exhaustion. Not only do they risk an inevitable disenchantment with religious observance when they outgrow the culture of techno dancing, but the physicality of their jubilation seems to leave little time for study of the traditional sources. In Europe before the war, he remarked, Breslovers were known as “the silent Hasidim.” The noisiness of the new celebrants threatens to make a caricature of the movement. Yet Avi admitted that the young hipsters have moderated their exuberance over the past decade while expanding the ranks of the main synagogue during services, so that the two wings of the movement seem to be moving closer to one another, rather than breaking apart.

And in terms of spectacle, the pilgrimage to Uman is now one of the great mass performances of contemporary Judaism, along with Simchat Torah on the Upper West Side, the 19th of Kislev—which commemorates the release of the founder of Lubavitch Hasidism from a czarist prison in the early 19th century— in Crown Heights and Lag B’omer at the grave site of the Talmudic sage Shimon bar Yochai in Meron, Israel. Unlike these other places, however, Uman is more isolated from the rest of the Jewish world, there is no community here except at Rosh Hashanah, and the holiday is more significant than these other occasions. These factors insure that no one comes to Uman casually; it seems impossible that one could observe the performance without participating in it.

Despite Avi’s disappointment with what he sees as the intellectual degradation of the Breslover movement, it seems as unlikely that he would cease coming to Uman every year as it is that I would return. “When a person chooses to be committed to a religious way of life,” he told me, “he can’t be dissuaded by one disappointment. My faith in Judaism comes from my devotion to Reb Nachman’s teachings, along with the Torah, the Talmud, the halacha. That can’t be shaken. If your commitment to Judaism can be disrupted by disappointment with a single experience, it wasn’t a real commitment.”

As I told him over the course of our weekend, however, a harmonic convergence has brought the two of us together in Uman that probably will not recur any time soon. The paths we have chosen for ourselves happened to have intersected this Rosh Hashanah, but what characterizes these journeys is the distance we have each taken from where we began, not an ultimate destination that might bring us together again.

Marc Caplan is a professor of Yiddish literature, language, and culture at the Johns Hopkins University.

Pomegranate Martini

3 oz. citron vodka

1 oz. pomegranate juice

Seeds of half a pomegranate

The Fish Head Martini

Juice of half a lemon

1/2 oz. simple syrup

Garnish with lemon twist

Serve chilled straight up in martini glass.

Apple Cart

2-1/2 oz. cognac

1 oz. Cointreau

Juice of 2 lemons

Juice of 1 orange

1 oz. fresh apple cider

Shake well with ice and serve chilled in cocktail glass. Garnish with apple slice.

Rosh Hashanah Sangria (left) and Fishy Mary

Rosh Hashanah Sangria

1 bottle of red wine, Merlot recommended

4 oz. peach schnapps

2 apples, chopped

10 dates

Juice of 1 orange

Refrigerate overnight.

Pour in wine glass over ice, garnish with apple slice.

Fishy Mary

2 oz. vodka

4 oz. tomato juice

Dash of Tabasco sauce

Dash Worcestershire sauce

Dash of bitters

1 sardine

Shake well, pour into wine glass over ice. Add salt and pepper; garnish with wedge of lime and a lemon.

Matisyahu, hip-hop artist

All are related to consciousness and health:

1. I would like to only put healthy things in my body. This includes eating more consciously, cooking my own food, and buying locally grown veggies, organic products, etc.

2. Exercise. I would like to have one consistent exercise. Not go crazy or anything, just simple stuff: ride a bike, take a hike, etc.

3. I would like to visit the Hasidic rebbes’ gravesites in Europe and spend time at each one, learning the teachings of that rebbe.

4. I would like to continue working on being present in whatever I am doing. To do things with truth, whole-heartedly.

Daphne Merkin, writer

To try in my personal habits to be more like Benjamin Franklin and less like Courtney Love. Early to bed and early to rise, that sort of thing. (Right now I stay up late, watching Iron Chef and Lock Up, when I should be reading Chekhov at the very least; and I get up near noon, by which time Christopher Hitchens has already produced 1,500 words on the issue of the day.)

To try and enjoy the little things; to stop looking for a blaze of light followed by a loud bang, or the transformative phone call, or the email that arrives out of the blue and will change everything. To be happy with my share instead of envying everyone who has a larger apartment. To appreciate that I am alive even though I’m not as thin or young or productive or, well, anything, as I had hoped to be.

To love where I am loved instead of pining after the unreachable or ungettable person (meaning man) without whom my life is incomplete. To accept that most couples are compromised arrangements at best and “the lion’s share of happiness,” to quote my beloved, never-married Philip Larkin, doesn’t necessarily belong to them. To remember that a woman without a man is like a woman without a man—pathetic in a noble sort of way.

To find some route back to the Jewishness I have cast off—not lightly, I might add—and for which I harbor great nostalgia. Not enough to make me actually seek out a shul that might suit me or to return to keeping separate kitchens in my apartment, but enough to hanker after Friday night invitations. To find some way of inserting it in my life in a meaningful fashion—whether it be taking a class or learning how to make gefilte fish from scratch.

Michael Showalter, comedian, star of Comedy Central’s Michael and Michael Have Issues

1. Improve backhand.

2. Learn to speak cat language.

3. Understand meaning of life.

4. No more ice cream every single night.

Naomi Alderman, author of Disobedience

I’m not generally big on New Year’s resolutions; I feel that being in therapy ought to cover my self-improvement needs for the year. Why improve yourself when you can outsource and have someone else do it for you?

However, as the festive season approaches I have been thinking that next year I really want to try to be more forgiving. It’s a very Christian-sounding resolution, I know. It’s not about “turning the other cheek,” though, but a more pragmatic approach: I’ve noticed that individuals who are unforgiving end up coming across as bitter and annoying. So for the sake of my soul or maybe just for the sake of appearances: more forgiveness this year.

Otherwise, there are just the constant ongoing resolutions of the battles one can never win. Answer email more promptly. Do not allow the washing up to sit around for several days. Go to the gym more often. Set a writing schedule and stick to it this time, goddammit—think of Trollope in his study, writing for three hours every morning from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m., and then going off to run the post office, be more like that. Get a post office, perhaps.

I once made a list of all the things I thought I should be doing on a daily basis and estimated how long each one would take. The total came to 28 hours a day, and didn’t include any time for sleep. Maybe I really need to learn to be more forgiving of myself.

Douglas Century, writer and author of Nextbook Press’s Barney Ross: The Life of a Jewish Fighter

I’d love to be able to explain basic biblical stories to my six-year-old daughter without having to look them up on Google. The other day, when I mentioned the story of Abraham (almost) sacrificing Isaac, she looked deeply troubled, and said, “I don’t understand—why would God tell Abraham to kill his own son?” I stammered something about how God was just testing Abraham, then found myself getting online and scrolling through website after website to read the various explanations for the Binding of Isaac. I realized I couldn’t remember the exact motives for Cain killing Abel, either. Or list more than a handful of Joseph’s brothers. Since my daughter is starting her religious education this year, it would be nice to relearn the stories that the 12-year-old me knew by heart.

I also use way too much profanity, especially driving. Since cursing under my breath at other aggressive drivers seems hardwired into my reptilian brain, and since I’m often driving with my daughter in her car seat behind me, I’m also constantly half-turning and apologizing for using bad language. “Daddy shouldn’t have said that, honey, you’re right.” It happens, too, when I’m on the phone. I’ve tried spelling out curse words, but Lena caught me at the first “S-H-I–.” So, I resolve to make every effort to clean up my act. Perhaps it’ll make me calmer and happier too.

Finally, I’m sure most people resolve to be more productive and focused each day. I need to go through a kind of social networking detox, or at least stop rationalizing hours wasted in the sinkholes of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube by telling myself it’s time spent doing “research.”

Ayelet Waldman, writer and author of Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace

1. Pay more attention to my husband.

2. Not worry as much about my children’s futures.

3. Turn off my damn appliances to save energy.

Mimi Sheraton, former New York Times food critic and Tablet Magazine food columnist

1. I resolve never again to serve my Italian husband matzo balls marinara or noodle kugel—which he abhors as “sweet pasta.”

2. I resolve not to tell guests that my chopped chicken livers contain gribenes. Let them enjoy!

3. I resolve never again to grate potatoes for latkes in my Cuisinart. From now on, it’s a hand-held, four-sided grater or nothing.

4. I resolve to lose the last 10 pounds. Doesn’t everyone?

Here’s Telepan’s recipe for Shredded Brisket Pasta. It’s delicious.

Shredded brisket pasta  (Serves 6)

Ingredients:

1 3-lb. piece beef brisket

Salt and black pepper to taste

4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

3 medium carrots

3 medium celery ribs

3 large red onions (a total of one pound)

1-1/3 cup dry red wine

3 cups veal stock

1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes

12 garlic cloves

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Pat brisket dry and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Heat two tablespoons of oil in a 6-quart heavy pot over moderately high heat until hot but not smoking, then add brisket and brown on both sides, about 12 minutes total.

Cut carrots, celery, and onions into one-inch pieces, then pulse in two batches in a food processor until finely chopped.

Transfer brisket to a platter. Add one tablespoon of oil and chopped vegetables to pot, then sauté over moderately high heat, stirring, until softened and golden, about five minutes. Add wine, stock, tomatoes, and 10 whole garlic cloves and bring to a boil.

Return brisket with any juices on platter to pot and cover, then transfer to oven. Braise brisket, turning over once per hour, until tender enough to shred with a fork, about three hours. Transfer to a cutting board and cut into 2-inch chunks, then shred with two forks. Purée sauce in two batches in food processor or a blender (use caution when blending hot liquids).

Mince remaining two garlic cloves. Heat the remaining tablespoon of oil in a cleaned pot over moderately high heat until hot but not smoking, then sauté garlic, stirring, for one minute. Add meat and sauté, stirring occasionally, for five minutes. Stir in sauce and season with salt and pepper.

Cook fettucine in a 6-quart pot of boiling salted water until al dente. Drain, then return to pot and add meat sauce.

Telepan tops the dish with grated pecorino cheese, but of course you’ll skip that part if you’re preparing a kosher meal.

Optional: House-Made Egg Fettuccine (makes one pound)

Ingredients:

8 teaspoons butter

3 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 whole eggs

8 egg yolks

2 to 4 tablespoons water

Preparation:

In a large bowl crumble the butter, flour, and salt between your fingers to make a course meal. Beat the eggs with one tablespoon of the water. Form a well in the middle of the flour mixture and pour the eggs into the well. Incorporate the eggs by stirring in the flour mixture from the sides of the well a little at a time (if dough is too dry, add some more of the water). When most of the flour is mixed in, form dough into a ball, transfer to a clean, flat surface, and knead for ten minutes.

Cover and let rest for 1 hour, refrigerated.

Using a pasta machine, roll into fettuccine noodles. Dry for at least 15 minutes on a pasta rack or baking sheet. Cook or refrigerate.

NOTE: If you don’t own a pasta machine, or don’t feel like rolling around in dough, you can use store-bought dry egg noodles instead.

A kitchen is a noisy place, and our humble microphone struggled against the sizzle of the oil and crackle of garlic, but here’s the master at work.

“You make accommodations for the economy,” said Fox, who added that several of her friends have dropped their synagogue memberships in the past year for financial reasons. “I think they’re being more strict but trying to be accommodating at the same time.”

It’s a double bind: many synagogue-goers—both the weekly and the annual variety—can’t afford the traditionally expensive tickets to services this year, while synagogues, which depend on the contributions of their members, are struggling to accommodate them.

In New York City, Rabbi Judith Hauptman, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary who leads a free service geared toward young adults every year, said she’s never gotten so many reservations so fast—but also that contributions from the donors who fund her service are lower than usual this year.

“The economic downturn is of course the kind of factor that’s going to increase turnout” because people seek solace in religion and community, Hauptman said. But that doesn’t mean they’ll be able to pay for it. “I think that the number of people looking for either inexpensive or free services this year is going to shoot way up.”

In Miami, Rabbi Hector Epelbaum of Temple Beth David, a Conservative shul, said he expects that the major fundraising that usually takes place around the High Holidays will be low this year—which is a problem because the synagogue is also offering more than the usual number of reduced rates and day school scholarships. “I feel that this year is going to be more difficult than the last one,” he said. According to the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, synagogues generally strive to cover between 60 and 70 percent of their costs with dues, but wind up with only 45 or 50 percent covered that way—an annual shortfall typically covered by donations. But with both dues and donations down, some synagogues are cutting programs, laying off staff, or asking rabbis to take paycuts.

Though many synagogues routinely offer free or reduced-rate High Holiday tickets to members in need, just as they offer negotiable membership fees, those provisions are often only accessible to people who ask for them. “I’ve had a lot of people who’ve had to come to me for the first time, and there’s a lot of pain in doing that,” said Rabbi Anthony Fratello, who leads Temple Shaarei Shalom, a Reform temple in Boynton Beach, Florida. “They feel terrible about it.”

But Alan Sherman, executive vice president of the Palm Beach County Board of Rabbis, says the perceived stigma of asking for help may be lifting this year. For the past 30 years Sherman has placed newspaper announcements before the High Holidays offering to match Jews in the community with free or discounted services. “This year things have been totally upside down due to the recession, people’s job losses, and the fact that people—and this is a good thing—aren’t embarrassed or ashamed to ask for help,” Sherman said. “I’ve been inundated with a lot of requests.”

For Sherman, this suggests that the traditional High Holiday ticket model isn’t working.

“Maybe we have to reexamine the issue of charging money for this,” he said. But Fratello read the situation differently: as an argument for the utility of the synagogue membership system. “Part of the reason synagogue membership is so important is that in hard times, there’s somebody you can turn to. There’s so many havurot,” he said, referring to Jewish fellowships that meet routinely for prayer, “that have sprung up and people say, ‘The synagogues aren’t necessary.’ That’s all well and good, until somebody needs something. If you don’t support the synagogue or the congregation when things are good, they’re not going to be able to support you when things are bad.”

Things were not always thus. For centuries, Jewish prayer was an oral tradition, said from memory. Even as authoritative liturgies were codified, most didn’t have access to texts. Rather, manuscripts—by definition handwritten and unique—were created for communal use, with myriad variations according to local rites. Some of the wealthiest may have had smaller, private copies, but, for the most part, congregations either chanted prayers from memory or repeated after a cantor. Not until Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in the early 1450s did books become accessible to a broader public, and for some time they remained a luxury.

But even within the unique realm of early prayer books, the Nuremberg Mahzor, which has just gone on public view for the first time in 52 years at the Israel Museum after a nearly year-long restoration, is exceptional. Completed in 1331 for the Jewish community of Nuremberg, the sumptuously decorated work is not only one of the most comprehensive illuminated Hebrew prayer books ever created, it is also among the largest medieval codices in the world.

Weighing more than 57 pounds, it is made up of 521 double-sided leaves. It includes holiday prayers for the entire Jewish calendar; the five books of the Bible known as the megillot, or scrolls; special prayers for lifecycle events like weddings and circumcisions; extensive commentaries; and—its main feature, accounting for roughly 90 percent of the text—over 700 piyutim, or liturgical poems. Moreover, the quality of the scribal work and elegantly embellished panels qualify the text as one of the region’s outstanding manuscripts. While communal mahzorim were also created in Spain, Italy, and other Jewish centers at that time, this monumental format was a phenomenon particular to the Franco-German Ashkenazi region.

Equally impressive is the work’s provenance. The colophon at the back indicates that it was commissioned by a Joshua the son of Isaac and completed on the fourth of Elul in the Hebrew year 5091. It remained in Nuremberg after the Jews were expelled from the city in 1499 and was preserved intact at the municipal library until the early 19th century, at which point, it is assumed, the Napoleonic army excised 11 of its original 528 leaves. More than a century later, the renowned publisher and Hebraica collector Salman Schocken embarked on a quest to reassemble the Nuremberg Mahzor and bring it to Israel. He recovered four of the missing leaves in the 1930s after fleeing Nazi Germany and acquired the rest in 1951 as restitution for assets that had been confiscated from him during the Holocaust. Descendants put it up for auction at Sotheby’s Tel Aviv in 2002, where it carried a $2-3 million estimate but failed to sell. At some point afterward, it was acquired privately by the Zurich-based collectors David and Jemima Jeselsohn, who have given it to the Israel Museum on extended loan. Through February 2010, it will be the centerpiece in the Shrine of the Book, home of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The restoration, conducted by Michael Maggen, head of the museum’s paper conservation laboratory, focused on rebinding the manuscript and incorporating the four recovered leaves. Overall, the mahzor was in excellent condition. “The decoration and writing looked like they were practically done yesterday,” according to assistant Judaica curator Anna Nizza, who adds that the colors and gold leaf “were amazingly preserved.” The highly skilled scribes who worked on the main text and commentary—identified as Mattanyah and Yaakov, respectively—made almost no errors despite the work’s considerable size. They also masterfully executed simple but sophisticated flourishes while leaving precise blanks around key words for, it is assumed, a Christian artist to subsequently decorate. (Jews were closed out of guilds at that time.)

Rather than iconographic subjects, human figures or narrative scenes that populate other significant 13th- and 14th-century mahzorim, the Nuremberg features 22 illuminated panels highlighting introductory words. These frames are adorned with gold and silver leaf and precious pigments, notably in rich hues of blue and red, and decorated with geometric patterns, as well as foliate motifs and exotic animals, typical of Gothic imagery. The scribes also alternated the size, type and color of the script—between black and red throughout. There is only a single text illustration, of a shofar, next to a line in a Rosh Hashana piyut about the sounding of the ram’s horn. “Unlike their contemporaries,” Nizza explains, “they chose ornamental and non-illustrative depictions, giving the manuscript an aesthetically pleasing and elegant look emphasizing its content while helping the chazan find appropriate prayers during the service.”

Shapiro’s meal and preparation are as historically accurate as possible to the year she’s living in, 1919, which means a menu based on local ingredients supplemented with things like kale and parsnips, grown by immigrants who smuggled seeds into the country. Surprisingly, the meat wasn’t a problem, as the town boasted, Paster says, “two kosher butchers with delivery: Jacob Segal in a horse and buggy and Harry Liberson, who came here from an advertisement looking for a butcher in The Jewish Messenger out of New York and has stayed for 65 years.”

Shapiro’s great-niece Elaine Krasker, 82, a former Democratic state legislator, has donated most of her forebears’ property to the museum, but she also kept a few things: “I put the scrub board up on the wall in my laundry room,” she said, “to remind me how hard life was … and how much easier it is today.” If you want to be reminded of the same, now you know where to go. Or, of course, you can just count your blessing on the way to Whole Foods.

Rosh Hashana, Circa 1919 [NYT]

When I first attended High Holiday services at UCLA, as a 19-year-old college freshman in 1995, two sisters shared cantorial duties. I had never before been so moved by chanting; their singing wasn’t flowery or operatic, as it had been at my Reform synagogue growing up. It was simple, soulful, and understated. After several years, these sisters moved on, and the UCLA rabbi, aware that I was the director of the school’s Jewish a cappella group and that my career in show business had included singing, asked me to take over. Having seen me in services, he knew I was already familiar with the way our community davened. On a dozen cassettes, the sisters recorded the trope for the hundreds of High Holiday machzor pages so that I could practice nightly in the year leading up to my first yontif as cantor, or chazzanit.

I felt I was living out a personal destiny: my mother’s father was a lay chazzan for his community of Holocaust survivors in the Bronx and San Diego. As a nine-year-old child in Poland, he left yeshiva to earn money for his family, but I had been told that he could have been one of the greats. My grandfather Ephraim (he went by “Frank”) was a feisty, primarily Yiddish-speaking Orthodox man who barely grasped the concept of a girl having a bat mitzvah. How would I explain to him, then almost 90, that I was going to lead services? That I’d wear a lacey kippah and the white kittel, or robe, typically worn by pious men on the High Holidays?

He was incredulous that a 26-year-old woman would perform a role traditionally reserved for men. He smiled gently, opened his mouth to debate the halachic implications, then thought better of it and sighed deeply. The world was changing faster than he could grasp.

My debut as a chazzanit marked many firsts: the first time I attended all services of all of the holidays, the first time I ever attended a Musaf or Yizkor service, and the first time I fasted a full 25 hours, even though I was nursing my firstborn son every two hours. All of this was so different from my experience growing up—in my family on Yom Kippur, we fasted until we got hungry, usually around lunch.

As my grandfather got older and more frail (and less confrontational about the unconventionality of a female chazzan), the months before the High Holidays became a special time for us. Our interactions were becoming more difficult as his mind faded, but I would rehearse the traditional melodies and ancient words with him at his retirement home, helping him recall his youth. He was not very communicative or psychologically aware, so I’m uncertain exactly which parts of this time together touched him most. I know that he was thrilled that I could “kvetch it out” like he did, nursing the mournful notes and having them catch in my throat, and he would grow teary-eyed as I practiced. He would listen with his head turned once his eyesight had failed him, to eliminate even the possibility that his attempts to look at me might take away from the spiritual and melodic experience. My voice was therapy for us both; it gave us something to connect with and brought us close together. He wished he could come to shul both to hear me and to take the lead in chanting the Maftir service (his favorite duty from his youth), but, being Orthodox, he would not drive on a holiday and was, by then, too frail to walk the far distance to our shul.

When I studied for my role as chazzanit, I did so in an academic way, setting out to learn dutifully all of the prayers which I had previously skimmed as a congregant. There was a tremendous amount of Hebrew I had never recited before and had to learn to pronounce. What surprised me in this process was that it became more than a rote study of text. It became a passion. I intuitively felt the rhythms of the prayers in my body as if they were written inside me. The trope made sense as if it was a physics equation that the universe had encoded for my voice millions of years ago. I was a conduit for the community. This was true when I chanted Kol Nidre, asking for a kind of pre-anullment of all the oaths and promises that our community will make that we may fail to fulfill. This was true as I held back tears recounting the massacre of the rabbis, and as I chanted El Maleh Rachamim for those who perished in the Holocaust. I felt a sense of mystical energy surrounding the congregation when I covered my head as the kohanim made their priestly blessing. I did not feel arrogant about the responsibility entrusted to me; I felt blessed and valued beyond measure.

As I grew more observant in those years, I started feeling a bit anxious about leading services. Doing so violated the rules of kol isha, the restrictions on the voice of a woman singing before men, forbidden in Orthodoxy. Though any man sufficiently concerned with this issue would probably not have been attending the service I led, where men and women sit together, I nevertheless chafed at the idea that my leadership role was a violation of codes of modesty, to which I was increasingly faithful. Moreover, there is a traditional prohibition about women reciting collective blessings on behalf of men. I felt uneasy about challenging that.

By the time I was expecting my second child, my pregnancy made some of these issues moot—after all, I couldn’t well stand on the bimah nine months pregnant, and so I took a “maternity leave.” Taking a break felt right—my life was now about parenting and exploring observance. A year later, I held baby number two and distracted my toddler with his train set as I sat listening to the daughters of the original chazzanit sisters chanting what I used to chant. These young women, one finishing high school, one in college, were beautiful, single, and they pronounced the Hebrew I often struggled with as if it was their first language. Although they sang so well, my heart broke for the lost opportunity to serve my community even while I was certain that tending to my boys was the best job I could ever have. In retrospect, I see that the tension I felt had to do not with wanting to take on a role that men traditionally fill, but with adjusting to being satisfied with my new role as a fully present mother to young children. Finding spiritual fulfillment within the confines of Jewish law is a hefty challenge for me, but I’m up to and am enjoying the journey. This year, those two gifted daughters will be on the bimah again and I’ll sit and follow along with my boys, now one and four, still with a bit of longing for the experience they’re having. But this time I will contribute in a way that feels right to me for now—I’ll attend all services, fast the full 25 hours on Yom Kippur while, yet again, nursing. And this time, I will be on the bimah, not chanting, but proudly blowing shofar.

Since the holiday is commonly called the “Jewish New Year,” one would think Rosh Hashanah would mark the first day of the first month of the Hebrew calendar. It doesn’t: Tishrei, on the first day of which we celebrate this major holiday, is the calendar’s seventh month. Why, then, is it given the distinction of marking the new year?

This question is especially vexing considering that—like the old adage about two Jews and twice as many opinions—the Hebrew calendar marks several different occasions as New Year’s Day: For example, the first day of Nissan, the first month, is the yardstick according to which we measure the years of the reign of kings, while if we were concerned with the tithing of animals, the date to keep in mind would have been the first of Elul, the sixth month.

Seven, however, had always had special meaning in Judaism; although Rosh Hashanah itself isn’t mentioned by name in the Bible, God, speaking to Moses in Leviticus 23:24, imagines the holiday as a sort of Sabbath for the soul: “On the first day of the seventh month,” says the Almighty, “you are to have a day of rest, a sacred assembly commemorated with trumpet blasts.”

These blasts come courtesy of the shofar, or ram’s horn, which is blown to awaken the congregation from its spiritual slumber and drive worshippers to repent. In the Mishna, the holiday is also referred to as “the day of judgment.” The world, the rabbis tell us, is assessed four times a year: on Passover, God passes judgment on the earth’s fertility for the coming year; on Shavuot, he judges the fruit of the trees, and on Sukkot, the rain. But on Rosh Hashanah, it’s man’s turn to stand trial.

Judaism being a legalistic religion, the procedure is described in detail. The Talmud, in the tractate on Rosh Hashanah, tells us that on that day God opens three celestial accounting books: in one He writes the names of the righteous, who will go on to live another year; and in the second, the names of the wicked, who shall perish from this earth before the year is over. The third, and most heavily populated, contains the names of those indeterminate souls whose fate hangs in the balance. They are then put on the heavenly waiting list, and have until Yom Kippur—the 10-day period known as Yamim Noraim (Days of Awe) or Asseret Yamei Teshuva (Ten Days of Repentance)—to repent for their past sins. And as we can never know for sure just which book has our name in it, goes the logic, best to join the atoners. The books, tradition has it, are sealed on Yom Kippur, which is why a common greeting in the period between the two holidays is le’shana tova tikatevu ve’tikhatemu—may your name be written and sealed for a good year.

Casting away sin, however, is serious business, so the custom of tashlikh was created, most likely in 13th-century Germany. The practice derives from the Book of Micah, which commands us in the penultimate verse of its last chapter, to cast all our sins “into the depths of the sea.” On the afternoon of the first day of Rosh Hashanah, Jews congregate by bodies of flowing water—usually rivers, seas, or, when necessary, faucets—toss in bits of bread and recite portions of Micah, and thereafter emerge cleansed and ready to repent.

WHAT DO WE EAT AND WHY?

You know all about the apples dipped in honey, which we eat to symbolize our wishes for a sweet new year. But did you know about the Rosh Hashanah seder? Though not celebrated as universally as the meal on Passover, it is nonetheless customary in many Jewish communities to hold a culinary ceremony on Rosh Hashanah’s first evening, chomping on myriad foods—from the head of a fish to leeks and gourds and black-eyed beans to pomegranates—and expounding on the symbolism of each one. The fish’s head, for example, represents our desire to be in the lead, and the pomegranate our wish to see our rights and good deeds become as plentiful as that fruit’s seeds. Some foods, however, are eaten because their names make for convenient puns in Hebrew or Aramaic: the carrot, for example, or gezer in Hebrew, is eaten to ward off gzerot, evil decrees, against the Jews. Then too, there is the challah. On Rosh Hashanah, the bread that appears year-round in its braided form is made on this holiday into a round, swirled shape, often enhanced with raisins. There are different reasons to explain the variation, among them that the circular shape has, like the world, no beginning and no end, or that the swirl looks like a crown, alluding to the head—or Rosh—of the year.

ANY DOS AND DON’TS?

This being a holiday, all the standard issurim, or forbidden things, prohibited on Shabbat apply.

During services, we recite two special prayers. The first is the U’Netaneh Tokef, a beautiful medieval poem about the solemnity of the day. “On Rosh Hashanah,” it reads, “will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die…. But repentance, prayer, and charity can remove the evil of the decree.”

The other prayer, the El Maleh Rachamim, is read frequently in the Days of Awe, and is a prayer for the souls of the departed, believed to be watching over those of the living in these crucial times.

And then there’s the shofar. Although it is traditionally blasted (that’s the technical term for what one does with a shofar, and the one who does it is called the blaster) every day during the month of Elul, the month preceding Tishrei, it is on Rosh Hashanah that awakening is expected to begin in earnest. The horn makes three sounds: tekiah, one long blast; teruah, a series of nine staccato blasts; and shevarim, a series of three broken sounds. Saadia Gaon, the great 10th-century rabbi, wrote extensively about the spiritual importance of the shofar, seeing in the instrument everything from an allusion to the ram Abraham sacrificed instead of Isaac to a reference to Sinai, where a shofar was blasted as God delivered his divine covenant to the Israelites. Whatever the meaning, it is considered a great mitzvah to hear the shofar on Rosh Hashanah.

ANYTHING GOOD TO READ?

Alas, no. With the exception of the prayers mentioned above, this is a day of reflection on personal deeds, past behaviors, and future resolutions.

FIVE MORE THINGS YOU CAN DO:

• Groove with Birthright’s delightfully bizarre holiday video, featuring a shofar-blasted rabbi and crunk rapper Lil’ John.

• Drool at Rosh Hashanah treats, Sephardi style.

• Curl up with S.Y. Agnon’s stunning anthology Days of Awe. Alternatively, take a gander at a history of the mahzor, the prayer book used on the High Holidays.

• Download your own iPhone Shofar app.

• Mix up a pomegranate cocktail and make the Days of Awe slightly less terrible.

Sugar, of course, would be as sweet. But honey has a special place in Jewish culinary history and is mentioned often in the Hebrew Bible. Righteousness is rewarded with deliverance to the land of milk and honey, two of nature’s own foods that provide ready sustenance to humans. It is a promise repeated in both Exodus 3:8 (“And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey”) and Deuteronomy 26:15 (“Look forth from Thy holy habitation, from heaven, and bless Thy people Israel, and the land which Thou hast given us, as Thou didst swear unto our fathers, a land flowing with milk and honey”), though in Proverbs 25:16, it comes with a warning: “If you have found honey, eat in moderation lest you overeat and vomit.” Gluttons beware.

Although wild honey was treasured in biblical times, the cultivation of bees for honey did not evolve until centuries later. I was surprised to learn that fact many years ago at the enchanting 550-acre biblical landscape reserve Neot Kedumim, which lies close to Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. In Deuteronomy 8:7-10, the abundance of the Holy Land is described by the presence of seven items that grow from the ground: wheat, barley, vines, fig and olive trees, pomegranates, and honey. But bees are animals, and so the Talmudic sages deduced that the honey referred to in that biblical passage was derived from dates. Sampling date honey at Neot Kedumim I found it to have a deep, rich, smoky flavor and a burnished sweetness although it was not nearly as subtly flowery as the bee honey that is now our staple.

In recent years, honey, a popular product in health food stores, has acquired “a health aura,” according to Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University: “Eat honey if you love the flavor, but it really is only comprised of sugars. The amounts of vitamins, trace minerals, and potassium in it are about equal to those in bottled water—so little as to be almost unmeasurable. Anything sugar will do to you, honey will also.”

As for apples’ part in the Rosh Hashanah ritual, they fit the definition of “new fruit,” supposed to be eaten at the New Year, and taken to mean either a fruit one has never tasted or which is new at the season, and celebrated with a recitation of the traditional shehechiyanu prayer marking first occasions. The apple also has biblical import; in the Song of Songs, Solomon sings, “Beneath the apple tree I aroused your love,” a gentle theme of affection for a new year, and a sentimental forerunner perhaps, of the World War II-era admonition not to “sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me,” popularized by the Andrews Sisters. It is also often assumed that it was an apple that corrupted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, though, in fact, the Hebrew word used in Genesis is pree, or fruit. According to Lytton John Musselman, the author of Figs, Dates, Laurel & Myrrh, a book about biblical plants, it’s unlikely such a fruit was an apple. “It was just too hot and dry for apples to grow,” Musselman said. “They need some cold. Through the years, bible translations from the Hebrew have been done mostly by European Christians who resorted to names of plants they were familiar with. The apple was an enormous favorite.”

Even my family’s beloved honey cake has bibilical roots. Genesis 18:6 tells of Abraham’s hospitality toward three passing strangers. The patriarch tells Sarah, “Make ready quickly three measures of fine meal and honey, knead it, and make cakes.” Having done this apparently to the guests’ satisfaction, Sarah is rewarded by being made fertile in her old age to bear the 100-year-old Abraham the only, much-wanted child of their marriage, Isaac.

I can’t promise a similar miracle if you follow the recipe below, but it will give you much pleasure whether you have it with vanilla or cinnamon raisin ice cream, homemade McIntosh applesauce, or a cup of tea, a glass of red wine, or even a shot of schnaps.

• • •

Honey Cake – Lekach

• 9 ½ x 5 ½ x 3-inch loaf pan
• Peanut oil for pan
• Bakers’ parchment paper for lining pan

• 1 1/3 cups dark floral honey
• 1/3 cup black coffee, brewed double strength
• 2 tablespoons peanut oil
• 3 extra large eggs
• 1/3 cup granulated sugar
• 2 1/2 cups sifted flour
• Pinch of salt
• 1 scant teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 scant teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 scant teaspoon powdered ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon powdered cloves
• 2 teaspoons grated orange rind
• 1 teaspoon grated lemon rind

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Brush peanut oil thoroughly around bottom and sides of the pan. Cut parchment paper to fit the bottom and sides of the pan and brush oil on one side of each strip. Fit paper into pan, placing un-oiled sides against the pan.

Using a heavy-bottomed 2- to 3-quart saucepan, bring honey to a boil, watching carefully every second. Honey boils up and over quickly which is why a large pan and vigilance are required. Let honey cool and then stir in coffee and 2 tablespoons of peanut oil.

Beat eggs with sugar until pale and thick and so that the mixture forms ribbons when dripped back on itself. Stir honey mixture into the beaten eggs. Resift flour with other dry ingredients and gently fold into batter along with grated citrus rinds.

Pour batter into the prepared pan and tap bottom of the pan gently on the countertop to release air bubbles.

Bake for 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 hours, or until top is golden brown and a tester inserted in the center comes out clean. Let the cake cool in the pan. This tastes best if allowed to ripen 24 hours before being served. Once thoroughly cool, cover top of cake with foil or waxed paper and store in a cool place. When serving, peel off only as much paper as necessary for the amount of cake you are cutting.