By Sarah Imhoff
On the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur
traditional prayers are in the plural: “May it be your will, Lord our God and
the God of our ancestors that you renew us for a good and a sweet year,” a Rosh
Hashanah prayer pleads. As Jonathan Sarna points out, even the prayers asking
for forgiveness during Yom Kippur use communal language.[1]
“We” have sinned, and therefore “we” ask for communal forgiveness. These are,
at their essence, communal religious holidays.
Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, marks one of the two
high points of synagogue attendance. The other, Yom Kippur, follows ten days
after Rosh Hashanah. Jews observe these high holy days as a community, often
with hundreds of their fellow Jews. Even many of those who do not set foot in a
synagogue during the rest of the year or have decisively left behind other
aspects of Jewish life appear.
What would these holidays be apart from the company of
others? For Jews in the American west in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, finding or creating a community was no easy feat. Even learning the
dates that corresponded to the Jewish calendar would require a letter, a visit,
or some kind of contact with other Jews. For Rachel Calof, who became a North
Dakota homesteader just months after her 1894 arrival in New York, the early
years of frontier life were lonely despite her in-laws crowding into her tiny
home. Apart from her husband’s family, she had no nearby Jewish neighbors, let
alone a synagogue. Her first decade as a homesteader was hard, and it was hard
on her Judaism.
The American west represented a radical departure from most
of the rest of Jewish history. These Jews left behind the shtetlach of Eastern Europe, the cities and towns of Western
Europe, and neighborhoods in American cities where they found Jewish communal
life available, or even the default mode of everyday life. But when they struck
out as pioneers into the sparsely populated landscape, the vast majority of
their nearest neighbors were non-Jews. The opportunity to convene a minyan (quorum of ten adult male Jews) seldom
arose, and ritual functionaries might visit only a few times a year. On the
frontier, a Jewish community represented a major achievement, and a rare one at
that.
By 1910, the Calof farm had grown significantly, and Rachel and
her husband Abraham had become prominent members of their region. In her
memoir, originally written in Yiddish, she begins her recollection of this
social transformation with an account of the holidays: “Our home became the
center for all the Jewish holiday celebrations. Jewish farmers came from far
and near to gather at our home for these occasions, some traveling for days by
horse and buggy or on horseback. These were wonderful and festive events.
Everyone stayed for as long as the holiday lasted. We put up for the visiting
children’s sleeping quarters, and in the house sleepers occupied all the chairs
and covered the floors.”[2]
Calof associated her economic success with her ability to bring together a
community for the holidays. Her first recollections about her upward mobility
weren’t about material or prestige; they were about convening a Jewish
community. Calof’s memoirs and her palpable joy at the opportunity to host a
Jewish community—however ad hoc the sleeping arrangements—suggest not that the
community gathers together in order to be blessed and forgiven, but rather that
the gathering together itself constitutes the blessing.
