Five Cans of Coconut Milk – my Reflections, the Day Before Rosh Hashanah Eve
I grew up in Pune, or Poona as it was called back then, amongst the Bene Israel community, where Rosh Hashanah always meant two things: Chik cha halwa, and a new set of clothes for each day of the high holiday. The shopping trip was planned well in advance, a budget set aside for the clothes, and my mother organised the halwa making so precisely that it would all be finished a day before Rosh Hashanah eve. It was as though the day itself demanded a kind of ceremony before the ceremony had even begun.
Preparing Chik cha halwa was no easy feat. It took time just to gather the ingredients and set everything up, and then close to three hours to stir the mixture of coconut milk, chik, which is wheat starch, and sugar or jaggery along with cardamom, nutmeg, saffron. All of us taking turns standing over the pot and stirring it again and again until it finally thickened, before leaving it to cool in thalis and cutting it into neat pieces, topping each one with nuts, and packing it all into small boxes to give away to family and friends across the community. We always had so much of it leftover, we'd be eating halwa for all three meals for the next couple of days.
We'd make the trip to the synagogue twice, once for the eve service and again the next morning for the main service, usually on my father's Royal Enfield with me perched on the petrol tank (I'm laughing thinking about how my British family would collectively react if I told them that a family of four, including two kids, travelled on a motorcycle). My mother would give us some quick behaviour tips and instructions for the day, and spend some time deciding where exactly we'd sit, which bench, usually somewhere in the front section near the tebah (Altar), that is if the women were seated downstairs with the men, or upstairs separately. We were always in a rush to get to the synagogue because if you got there too late, you'd lose the prime benches.
A key highlight of Rosh Hashanah eve was the fact that there was usually a photographer or two from local newspapers trying to get a nice photo for the next day's Pune Times. Later that same evening, I remember coming home from the synagogue with an armful of halwa boxes from family friends, and trying a piece from each one, carefully critiquing the taste, the texture, the colour, the quantity and combination of nuts, and my mother's key rating criteria above all else, which was whether it had been made traditionally using wheat starch, or the shortcut, lazier way using China grass (a plant-based gelling agent).
I remember waking up the next morning, Rosh Hashanah day itself, with the specific thrill of going through the newspaper, hunting for our faces somewhere among the crowd, feeling half proud and half embarrassed to have been caught looking so dressed up, with a kippah on my head, and so unusually serious. There was also a collective eye rolling ritual after looking at quotes from the same two senior male members of the community. I still have some of those newspaper cuttings saved in a file, because my parents made sure we bought more than one copy every year after Rosh Hashanah.
The main service itself was not memorable actually, not for me as a kid anyway, because it was all in Hebrew, a language not many of us spoke or understood in Maharashtra. For those who didn't read or speak Hebrew, there were transliterated versions of the book, sometimes with a helpful English translation. All I really wanted to do was go play with the other kids and eat halwa. The one moment that cut through all of that restlessness, though, was the sound of the Shofar (Ram's horn). Whatever we children were up to, everybody fell completely silent and attentive the second it was sounded, on both days of the service. It was one of the specific mitzvahs (Hebrew word that literally translates to "commandment" or "obligation ) of Rosh Hashanah, hearing the sound of the Shofar, and even as a child who understood very little of what was happening around me in Hebrew, I understood that this particular sound was something I should pay attention to. I remember having the urge to laugh looking at how serious everybody suddenly became, but controlling the urge, looking at my sister, who’d raised an eyebrow, almost warning me about the repercussions of being caught laughing in that moment).
I understand now, as an adult, that the sound of the Shofar had a spiritual meaning, possibly meant as a kind of call to awakening, a way of shaking you out of the routine of the year gone by. As a child I only knew it as the one sound powerful enough to make an entire room of people go quiet at once.
I didn't think of any of that as ritual at the time. It was simply what Rosh Hashanah looked like, in the same way that the day itself simply looked like hours spent on a hard synagogue bench, sitting through prayers I was far too young and far too restless to find any real meaning in.
High holidays were really my father's jam. He was a religious man, serious about all the customs and traditions, and he had a specific way of doing everything. I remember he had an old prayer book, one he looked after very carefully, kept in its own slightly cracked case. And he had a blue satin bag he kept for his tzitzit (prayer shawl), which was brought out before Rosh Hashanah. I miss him a lot more during the high holidays than at other times of year, I think because they were so unmistakably his. I feel a pang of grief as I write this and think of my father, who made sure we all followed certain traditions and did things the way they were meant to be done. I hated the strictness of it all then – following instructions, being told what to do, sitting still for hours and not being told what the prayers meant.
And not even being counted in the Minyan or Congregational Quorum of 10 men after all of that! I remember feeling a deep sense of injustice about why the women in that room, who had toiled away making festive treats and ironed all the outfits and worked out exactly where the family would sit and stood there for just as many hours as anyone else, somehow didn't count toward the number that made a gathering official enough for the most important words to be spoken. I never got a satisfactory answer, and it's only recently, as an adult, that I learned this particular rule, ten men and not ten people, is an Orthodox tradition specifically, not a universal one, and that some more progressive Jewish communities such as Reform and Conservative Jews count any ten adults toward a Minyan regardless of gender, which somehow makes the years of silence I got as a child feel both more understandable and slightly more frustrating at once, knowing the question had an answer somewhere, just not in the room I happened to be sitting in.
I'm a mother myself these days, living far from Pune and far from that particular synagogue in the heart of Poona, and that changes how Rosh Hashanah lands for me. I now find myself thinking more about the rituals and traditions that got passed down to me and less about the parts I used to resist as a child. I see now how it was never really about the theology or the counting of ten men that mattered, but the making of chik cha halwa together as a family, the cleaning up before the festival, the outfit choosing, overeating festive treats… going to Bund Garden for Tashlich, or "sea prayers," on the afternoon of Rosh Hashanah, standing with a group of people as the Hazzan read the prayers, feeling slightly embarrassed when people around wondered what was going on.
Becoming a parent myself has changed the way I relate to my own parents and grandparents entirely, in a way I don't think I could have understood from the outside looking in. I also appreciate my mother a lot more, how she managed to make everything work, organise it all, cook for all of us, keep the house tidy, make sure we all made it to the services in time, and still keep her sanity intact. Rosh Hashanah isn't just another year passing anymore, another entry on the calendar to get through. It feels instead like a thread I'm standing somewhere in the middle of, with my grandparents at one end and Eli at the other, and I find myself wondering, in a way I never used to, what it must have taken from my parents to organise all of it year after year, the outfits, the food, the halwa, the seating, the discipline, while also just trying to raise us and hold everything else together. I understand now, watching myself attempt some version of the same thing for Eli, that none of it was ever effortless for them. It was work, done quietly and repeatedly, out of something that looks a lot like love the closer I get to it.
I can't hand Eli the synagogue I grew up in, the taste of the halwa my mother made, or the ride to the synagogue sat precariously on my dad's Enfield's petrol tank. I don't know yet what I'll hand him instead, or which parts of all this are even mine to pass on. Maybe my mother's halwa recipe. Maybe my questions I never got answers to... I'm still working that out… But for now, I have 5 cans of coconut milk and a halwa recipe to try out… along with a list of other things to do before Rosh Hashanah eve tomorrow.
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