Laugh Factory, Cedars-Sinai streaming Rosh Hoshana services

By Steven Herbert

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center plans to stream a Rosh Hashana service for 24 hours beginning at 7 a.m. Tuesday while the Laugh Factory will stream a service at 11 a.m. on its YouTube channel, Instagram, and Facebook page.

Cedars-Sinai’s service will be streamed at www.cedars-sinai.org/patients-visitors/spiritual-care/judaism/services.html.

Participants can follow along with the service via a downloadable PDF High Holy Days prayer book available at www.cedars-sinai.org/content/dam/cedars-sinai/patients/spiritual-care/documents/high-holidays-prayer-book.pdf.

This will be the 38th consecutive year The Laugh Factory has provided free High Holy Days services.

Rosh Hashana began at sundown Monday, with some Los Angeles congregations and Jewish organizations conducting online and outdoor services for a second consecutive year, while indoor services returned at others after a year’s absence.

“The difference between the high holidays last year and this year has really been the development of the COVID-19 vaccines,” said Rabbi Jason Weiner of Knesset Israel, a Beverlywood-based Modern Orthodox congregation. “It was a major turning point, and I think this year we can truly look forward to a new beginning.”

Rosh Hashana marks the Jewish New Year and ushers in the Days of Awe, a 10-day period of repentance and contemplation culminating in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, Judaism’s most solemn and somber day.

During the High Holy Days, Jewish tradition holds that God records the fate of each person for the coming year in the Book of Life, which is sealed at the end of Yom Kippur.

Services marking the arrival of the year 5782 on the Hebrew calendar were held Monday night — the day begins at sundown on the Hebrew calendar — and continue Tuesday. They feature the blowing of the shofar, a ram’s horn mentioned in the Torah and used by ancient Jews in religious ceremonies and as a call to arms — and now used at Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.

Jews are biblically commanded to hear the shofar during the High Holy Days.

Rosh Hashana is a time when Jews gather with family members and their communities to reflect on the past year and the one beginning. Celebrants also eat festive meals featuring apples dipped in honey, symbolic of the wishes for a sweet year.

In his Rosh Hashana message, President Joe Biden said, “Rosh Hashanah and the Days of Awe that follow charge those who celebrate to pause, look inward, and reflect on the past year. It is a time to undertake an inventory of the soul, a cheshbon hanefesh, and to ask of ourselves and of each other questions that go beyond our own individual faiths: Who do I want to be? What type of nation do we want to forge? What type of world do we want to create?

“That is the message and gift of the Jewish New Year — a reminder of our infinite capacity to transform our lives and begin anew. To partner with the Divine and our fellow human beings in the ongoing work of creation. To rebuild our communities through empathy, acts of kindness, and compassion. To seek repentance, or teshuva, when we have fallen short of our values.

“Rosh Hashanah is a reaffirmation that we are each endowed, by virtue of our Creator and our common humanity, with the ability to bridge the gap between the world we see and the world we seek.”

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