Melissa Stein brought a bag of old hamburger buns with her to the Manhattan Beach pier Monday. She gathered there with a crowd of three hundred others toting stale bread and matzo.
“If you live at the beach there is no better place to cast off your sins,” Stein, 44, said.
For the past eight years she has been coming to the pier on Rosh Hashanah to symbolically cast her sins away by throwing pieces of bread off of the pier. The ceremony, Tashlich, has been hosted at the pier for more than twenty years by the synagogues Congregation Tikvat Jacob in Manhattan Beach and Temple Menorah in Redondo Beach.
The crowd, which can range anywhere from forty to five hundred people, gathers at the pier to sing in Hebrew and throw bread. Some attendees carry ram horns, which they blow into in unison at the beginning of the ceremony.
Rabbi Mark Hyman of Congregation Tikvat Jacob said that the ceremony often surprises fishermen on the pier.
“They’re surely not Jewish and they certainly have never seen anything like this before,” he said.
Synagogue president Diane Levitt laughed as she recalled how fishermen often stare on surprised as hundreds of Jews gather around the Roundhouse Aquarium to sing.
“We’re walking down the pier, singing in a language that’s—I’m just going to say it—not spoken in Manhattan Beach that much,” Levitt said.
But Levitt said the public display of the ritual is a large part of its appeal, pointing out public Christmas celebrations as a comparison.
“We’re self-conscious of being visible,” she said. “This is one of the few opportunities we have to be public about our religion.”
Manhattan Beach resident April Wayland is the author of a children’s book about the city’s Tashlich ceremony called “New Year on the Pier.” The book reflects upon the experience from a child’s perspective.
Levitt said that Tashlich is universally relatable, no matter what a person’s creed or age.
“Everybody has things they wish they’d done differently and almost all of us can appreciate the opportunity to stop and think about what those things are,” Levitt said. “The physical act of casting the bread off the pier is just a gesture, just a symbol. Those physical acts help reinforce thinking. They let us feel we’ve actually taken a step in the right direction. And it’s something all ages can do.”
Being outside on the pier is also an important part of the experience.
“When I’m in a building I don’t always connect spiritually,” Wayland said.
“You think about the thing you did and then you throw a piece of bread into the ocean to let it go,” she said. “For me it’s like no one else is there in that moment.”
Hyman said that he feels lucky to be able to have this ceremony at the pier. The tradition calls for any body of water, and Hyman said that the Pacific Ocean is a particularly beautiful setting for the event.
“It’s a day to take jackets and ties off for some of us,” he said. “It reaffirms how lucky we are to live here.”
He recalled a year when he raised an arm after quoting a passage from the Torah and announced that it was time for the crowd to cast away their sins—and at that exact moment, two dolphins jumped out of the water.
“It was almost on cue, like on Sea World,” he said. “It was such an amazing moment.”
Levitt said that the occasion often feels a bit “magical” because it does not require the same type of studies and reading of Hebrew texts that other practices in Judaism require.
Beth Garden, 49, rode her bike down to the pier to participate in Tashlich.
“It’s nice to have a fresh start in a religious context and to know that religious context is more universal,” she said. ER
