The Offering: A Tashlikh Prayer, by Rabbi Jill Hammer

Contributor(s):

Rabbi Jill Hammer, Ph.D.

Shared on:

31 August 2019 under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 International copyleft license

Categories:

Rosh haShanah (l’Maaseh Bereshit), Repenting, Resetting, and Forgiveness, Tashlikh

Tags:

58th century A.M., Prayers as poems, English vernacular prayer, תשובה teshuvah, תשליך tashlikh, 21st century C.E.

Today I turned my heart toward the new year and wrote a prayer-poem for Tashlikh, the Rosh haShanah ritual of casting bread or stones into the water to cast off one’s past wrongdoings.

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Contribute a translation	Source (English)
	The Offering: A Tashlikh Prayer
	I cast this gift to the water.
	It is my past: blessing and regret. It is my present: reflection and listening. It is my future: intention and mystery.
	It is what I did and did not; it is yes and no and silence.
	It is what was done and what arose from what was done and what arises in this body remembering.
	I let it all go. I own neither the sting nor the sweetness. I hold on to nothing.
	The river has no past. Each moment of rushing water Is a new beginning.
	Harm that has been: heal in the rush of love and truth and time. We who are lost: let the current take us homeward.
	May these waters churn what is broken into what is whole. May each separate droplet reach the ocean that is becoming.
	The journey awaits. I have no power to refrain from it; only to steer it when I can.
	May the One who is the great Crossroad guide my turning.
	Three times I declare: It is finished. It is born. It is unending.
	Three times I listen: It is love. It is the river. It is before me.
	May my offering go where it is meant to go and may the one who offers it find the way.
	Amen.

. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike . 4.0 . International .

“The Offering: A Tashlikh Prayer, by Rabbi Jill Hammer” is shared through the Open Siddur Project with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.

Rabbi Jill Hammer, Ph.D.

Jill Hammer is the Director of Spiritual Education at the Academy for Jewish Religion. Jill is the author of two books: “Sisters at Sinai: New Tales of Biblical Women” (JPS, 01) and “The Jewish Book of Days: A Companion for All Seasons” (JPS, 06). She is the co-founder of the Kohenet Institute, a program in Jewish women's spiritual leadership. An essayist, poet, midrashist and ritualist, her work has been in publications including Zeek Magazine, The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, The Torah: A Women's Commentary, The Forward, The Jewish Spectator, and Lilith as well as on-line on many websites. Several of her divrei torah can be heard on soundcloud, thanks to the Romemu congregation.

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Works of related interest:

Image: Lone Leaf in Water by TokyoLunch (License: CC-BY 2.0)

A Ten-Step, Four-Worlds, One-Earth Tashlikh, by Avi Dolgin

"Dew, Winter, Norcal" (image: Jay Mantri, license CC0)

תפילת גשם בזכות האמהות | Prayer for Rain in the Merit of the Matriarchs by Rabbi Jill Hammer

The crescent Earth rises above the lunar horizon in this spectacular photograph taken from the Apollo 17 spacecraft in lunar orbit during final lunar landing mission in the Apollo program. (Image Credit: NASA
NASA Identifier: 363737main_pg124_as17-152-23274)

אוֹרָה הִיא | Orah Hee (She is light), a piyyut by Rabbi Jill Hammer (2008)

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בָּאנוּ חׇשֵׁךְ לְקַדֵּשׁ | Banu Ḥoshekh l’Ḳadesh (We come to sanctify the dark), by rabbis David Seidenberg and Jill Hammer

Small rocky stream of water (credit: Neomeesje, license: CC BY-SA)

Kavvanot for before and after Tashlikh, by Rabbi David Seidenberg (neohasid.org)

Tashlikh service on Rosh haShanah (Zalman Kleinman, 20th c.)

תַּשְׁלִיךְ | Tashlikh (Spanish translation by Shmuel Gonzales)

Prayer that the Lands of Our Freedom Never Resemble Mitsrayim, by Rabbi Jill Jacobs

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ויהי נעם אדני אלהינו עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננה עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננהו "May the pleasantness of אדֹני our elo’ah be upon us; may our handiwork be established for us — our handiwork, may it be established." –Psalms 90:17