Emily’s First Rosh Hashanah

Last week we took Emily to our synagogue for her first taste of a Jewish holiday. Jewish New Year, or Rosh Hashanah as it’s known, is one of the more solemn and serious festivals in the calendar – a time to repent for our sins and listen to the sound of the shofar (ram’s horn) in synagogue.

The latter makes a bit of a noise when it’s blown, and I was a bit concerned about the effect this might have on Emily. Nonetheless, as a major Jewish holiday I thought it was the perfect time to introduce my little one to her religion.

Of course, it also offered a perfect excuse to dress her up in all those frocks I’ve been just longing for her to wear (so far consigned to the back of the wardrobe because let’s face it, flouncy frilly dresses look a bit out of place in the trolley seat at Asda or while wriggling around on a playmat).

On Saturday she wore a pink linen dress to our family lunch, and for her synagogue debut on Sunday it was a green frilly number complete with a butterfly print coat. The latter created such an impression that certain members of our congregation were convinced it was an expensive designer number, and we were forced to confess that we’d actually picked it up in H&M’s fabulous ‘buy one, get one free’ sale earlier this summer.

True to form, Emily’s reaction to her dresses was to grab hold of them and try to eat them the second I put them on, but there was no denying she looked lovely once I managed to get them out of her mouth. As for the synagogue itself, she was perfectly behaved, not so much as flinching at the first batch of shofar blasts and in fact sleeping through subsequent blasts, although she did wake up towards the end of the service and look a bit lost and puzzled at the strange noise that was going on.

Mostly though, she enjoyed staring at the lights, wriggling around on her tummy in the middle of the children’s service and generally being cooed over by everybody she met. Our ever friendly Rabbi told us after the service that the sound of the Shofar is meant to represent the cry of a child, although our Emily’s cry sounds less like a ram’s horn and more like Crazy Frog.

We’ll be doing the whole synagogue thing all over again for Yom Kippur (the Jewish Day Of Atonement, most solemn day of the year) this week and then she’s having a baby blessing next weekend, which will have the added bonus of free food as well as the chance to dress her up in yet another flouncy frock.