Click here to view the original December 19, 2008 story.

KIM LAWTON: It’s the season of Santa Claus, and it seems he’s everywhere. Children anxiously await the arrival of Santa who is, of course, bearing gifts. But some Christians are worried that most of those children, and their parents as well, don’t know who “jolly old Saint Nicholas” really was.

Canon JIM ROSENTHAL (Founder, UK/USA St. Nicholas Society): St. Nicholas was a real person — not a fairy, not someone who’s flying through the sky with reindeer, but an actual person who lived and worked and died and had a full life. He had a Christian life because he was actually a bishop, a pastor.

“If we don’t recover this tradition…we are going to eventually lose Christmas”

LAWTON: As director of communications for the worldwide Anglican Communion, Canon Jim Rosenthal was always on the lookout for images of bishops. He says he was captivated by a fourth-century bishop named Nicholas. Now Rosenthal helps lead an international movement urging churches to reclaim Saint Nicholas.

Canon ROSENTHAL: I believe that Saint Nicholas and his tradition is something that needs to be recovered and now.

LAWTON: Rosenthal is founder of the UK/USA Saint Nicholas Society.

Canon ROSENTHAL: The children are getting these that say “I met the real and true Santa Claus and Father Christmas.”

LAWTON: Every year, he dresses up like Saint Nicholas, complete with the bishop’s staff called a crozier and his distinctive hat called a miter.

Canon ROSENTHAL: I have to decide if I wear one of those miters or this miter. This is the most pretty one.

LAWTON: He visits churches to help spread the Saint Nicholas message.

Canon ROSENTHAL: If we don’t recover this tradition, I believe that we are going to eventually lose Christmas, any semblance of a religious Christmas.

LAWTON: Nicholas was born in Asia Minor when the new Christian faith was beginning to spread across the Roman Empire.

Canon Jim Rosenthal visits churches to help spread the Saint Nicholas message.

Canon ROSENTHAL: He came from a very wealthy family. His parents died at an early age. His uncle was a priest. That was the undivided church in those days. There was no Roman Catholic Church or other kinds of churches — one church. And he became a priest like his uncle.

LAWTON: Nicholas rose to leadership in the early church and was named Bishop of Myra, a city on the southern coast of what is now Turkey. During a time of persecution by Roman Emperor Diocletian, Nicholas was imprisoned for his outspoken faith. He was eventually released and continued his ministry until his death on December 6 in the year 343.

Canon ROSENTHAL: He was known for his generosity and his good will because he was very rich. He literally, by the end of his life, gave away all of his fortune. Many stories talk about the fact that he was so generous that he became known as the Gift Giver.

LAWTON: More and more churches in the US and the UK are finding ways to keep the Saint Nicholas stories alive. For example, the Episcopal Cathedral of Chicago hosted a special Saint Nicholas exhibit.

Reverend JOY ROGERS (St. James Cathedral, Chicago, IL): The stories of Saint Nicholas are wonderful stories of a bishop who cared about his people, who cared very much about the poor.

LAWTON: There are numerous tales of Nicholas doing good deeds: performing miracles, calming the seas, stopping famine and rescuing children. Separating truth from myth can be difficult.

Rev. Joy Rogers

Rev. ROGERS: My guess is that some of the fanciful stories that have moved into the realm of legend and miracle had their roots in very concrete acts of very real kindness and generosity.

LAWTON: One of the most famous stories involves a poor family who couldn’t afford marriage dowries for their three daughters.

Rev. ROGERS: The parents were going to have to sell them off into slavery or into prostitution or whatever, and Saint Nicolas came by the house at night and dropped off three bags of gold coins.

LAWTON: Some legends say he secretly tossed the bags of gold through an open window, and one landed in stockings or shoes that were drying by the fire, thus launching the tradition of the Christmas stocking. Pawnbrokers have especially embraced that story.

Canon ROSENTHAL: If you go to a pawnbroker shop you’ll see three gold balls. Those represent the three bags of gold, which we now turn into chocolate coins that Saint Nicholas threw through the window to save three girls from slavery or prostitution.

LAWTON: Nicholas has been adopted by many groups beyond pawnbrokers.

Canon ROSENTHAL: So many people love him, and so many people wanted him as

theirs that he’s the patron saint of almost everything: unwed women, children, which of course is the most prominent; pawn brokers; sailors and merchants and cookie makers, apothecaries. You just name it, and he’s got something to do with it.

LAWTON: Many European countries have a long tradition of celebrating the Feast Day of Saint Nicholas on December 6. Then Saint Nicholas evolved into Santa Claus and got all tied up with Christmas.

“He’s the patron saint of almost everything”

Canon ROSENTHAL: If you look at the name Santa Claus, you will see its “Santa” means saint, and “Claus” is simply an abbreviation from the “Nicholas.” But the reality is he became a secular image.

SANTA (reading to children): Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, in hopes that Saint Nicholas soon would be there.

LAWTON: American writers and advertisers helped disseminate a new myth that made no mention of the jolly old saint’s religious connections.

Canon ROSENTHAL: We always talk about roots and being politically correct. Let’s be politically correct about Santa Claus and give him his proper title.

LAWTON: Church leaders emphasize that Saint Nicholas’s generosity was motivated by his Christian faith. The saint was following Jesus’ commands to love others, help those who are suffering, give sacrificially, and to do one’s good deeds in secret. They say Nicholas is a reminder that Christmas is really about the coming of Jesus.

Canon ROSENTHAL: The problem with Santa Claus as it stands now is that it’s a substitute for Christmas — Santa Claus instead of the creche, instead of the manger, instead of the nativity scene. This man we would find kneeling at the nativity scene saying, “This is what I’m here to celebrate as well.”

LAWTON: Nicholas may have been called the Gift Giver, but Christians teach that on Christmas God gave the world the ultimate gift — Jesus .

Canon ROSENTHAL: Symbolically, as a Christian leader St. Nicholas is pointing, like other Advent stories, pointing towards this event called Christmas, which as Christians we believe is the most wonderful night of the year.

LAWTON: And that, they say, is the true meaning of Saint Nicholas. I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

It is true that for many people “faith” and “belief” are just two words for the same thing. But they are not the same, and in order to grasp the magnitude of the religious upheaval now under way, it is important to clarify the difference. Faith is about deep-seated confidence. In everyday speech we usually apply it to people we trust or the values we treasure. It is what theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965) called “ultimate concern,” a matter of what the Hebrews spoke of as the “heart.”

Belief, on the other hand, is more like opinion. We often use the term in everyday speech to express a degree of uncertainty. “I don’t really know about that,” we say, “but I believe it may be so.” Beliefs can be held lightly or with emotional intensity, but they are more propositional than existential. We can believe something to be true without it making much difference to us, but we place our faith only in something that is vital for the way we live. Of course people sometimes confuse faith with beliefs, but it will be hard to comprehend the tectonic shift in Christianity today unless we understand the distinction between the two.

The Spanish writer Miguel Unamuno (1964-1936) dramatizes the radical dissimilarity of faith and belief in his short story “Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr,” in which a young man returns from the city to his native village in Spain because his mother is dying. In the presence of the local priest she clutches his hand and asks him to pray for her. The son does not answer, but as they leave the room, he tells the priest that, much as he would like to, he cannot pray for his mother because he does not believe in God. “That’s nonsense,” the priest replies. “You don’t have to believe in God to pray.”

The priest in Unamuno’s story recognized the distinction between faith and belief. He knew that prayer, like faith, is more primordial than belief. He might have engaged the son who wanted to pray but did not believe in God in a theological squabble. He could have hauled out the frayed old “proofs” for the existence of God, whereupon the young man might have quoted the equally jaded arguments against the proofs. Both probably knew that such arguments go nowhere. The French writer Simone Weil (1909-43) also knew. In her Notebooks, she once scribbled a gnomic sentence: “If we love God, even though we think he doesn’t exist, he will make his existence manifest.” Weil’s words sound paradoxical, but in the course of her short and painful life—she died at thirty-four—she learned that love and faith are both more primal than beliefs.

*

Creeds are clusters of beliefs. But the history of Christianity is not a history of creeds. It is the story of a people of faith who sometimes cobbled together creeds out of beliefs. It is also the history of equally faithful people who questioned, altered, and discarded those same creeds. As with church buildings, from clapboard chapels to Gothic cathedrals, creeds are symbols by which Christians have at times sought to represent their faith. But both the doctrinal canons and the architectural constrictions are means to an end. Making either the defining element warps the underlying reality of faith.

*

Several years ago an acquaintance of mine described himself to me in a casual conversation as “a practicing Christian, not always a believing one.” His remark puzzled me, but it also began to clarify some of the enigmas that had swirled within both my personal faith and my thinking about religion and theology. His remark suggested that the belief/nonbelief axis is a misleading way of describing Christianity. It misses the whole point of not only Christianity, but other religions as well. I have never heard this insight expressed more eloquently than I did one evening in Milan, Italy, where in 1995 Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini had invited me to give a talk at what he called his annual “Lectureship for Nonbelievers.”

I had not known what to expect, but it turned out to be quite a glittering occasion. A large crowd draped in Armani and Prada had assembled in an ornate public hall, and I was already seated when Martini, who stands well over six feet tall, entered in a scarlet cassock and black biretta, the full regalia of a prince of the church. He welcomed the audience and then went on to say that by calling this an event for “nonbelievers” he did not intend to imply anything about the people present. “The line between belief and unbelief,” he said, “runs through the middle of each one of us, including myself, a bishop of the church.”

BOB FAW, correspondent: For people of faith, services which acknowledge, indeed commemorate, death can bring comfort or anguish. Thomas Beveridge’s Yizkor Requiem recognizes both. Performed here by the orchestra and chorus of London’s St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the music is emotional and cerebral—suggestive, even, at times, haunting. Conducted by Sir Neville Marriner and recorded for the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music, the Yizkor Requiem was composed by Beveridge not just to remind listeners of what Beveridge says “really matters,” but also to combine, musically, two faiths.

THOMAS BEVERIDGE (Composer and Conductor): I realized that I could put together a piece that kind of stands on the bridge between the two religions, the Christian religion and the Jewish religion, and takes a look at, simultaneously, at the ritual for the dead.

FAW: Beveridge says he was inspired to compose this piece after the 1991 death of his father, an Episcopal priest and scholar who immersed himself in both faiths. It was, says Beveridge, “a quest for spiritual roots.”

BEVERIDGE: My quest and my father’s quest. My father inspired me to look at the origins of Christian liturgy in the synagogue. I mean, that’s basically what we’re talking about here.

FAW: Was it an attempt to come to terms with his death, or to memorialize him, or both?

BEVERIDGE: I think both. I find it a very cathartic experience to make this effort in his memory, and in the process I learned a lot.

FAW: What Beveridge, a church organist, choir director, and composer of more than 600 works, learned over the two years he spent writing the Yizkor Requiem is that despite profound differences in theology, the two faiths share enormous common ground.

BEVERIDGE: I went through the Requiem Mass and found passages that were almost exactly the same as passages in the Yizkor service or in similar synagogue ritual, and that’s where the Mass came from. It came directly out of the synagogue.

FAW: “Yizkor,” Hebrew for “may he remember,” is a memorial service for the deceased. The Requiem is the music for a Catholic funeral service, seeking eternal rest for the departed. While a Requiem emphasizes comfort, and the Yizkor can be sad, musically they reinforce one another.

Here, for example, as the cantor sings the Kaddish in Hebrew, the chorus underneath sings the Lord’s Prayer in English—each of them a doxology, a hymn praising God.

BEVERIDGE: The Kaddish is a doxology. The Lord’s Prayer is a doxology, though the Yizkor Requiem begins with the Kaddish prayer, which is what every Jew says at the Yahrzeit, the annual remembrance of anyone in his family who has died.

FAW: Another similarity which Beveridge accents musically: the word “holy,” repeated here three times in Hebrew—kadosh, then three times in Latin—sanctus.

But make no mistake: while much of this composition is solemn, parts are also light-hearted, or what Beveridge calls “lickety-split.” “I wanted,” says Beveridge, “to give the impression of a train that gets going and keeps going, going along.”

BEVERIDGE: It’s not all very ponderous stuff. There’s a lot of joy in it—the joy of recognizing that a departed soul may be resting in Eden, in the Garden of Eden.

FAW: Perhaps the most dramatic moment of all in the Yizkor Requiem comes at the end, when a single flute plays a plaintive theme. Finally, with the soft refrain of “Amen” by the chorus, the flute slowly fades away.

BEVERIDGE: The flute player turns around and walks out of the building and disappears, and the last phrase is played over and over and over again until the player can hardly be heard any more. I wanted to depict the departing soul somehow, and the flute playing the melody of the ninth movement, the words of which are “the souls of the righteous are in the hands of God.”

FAW: What Beveridge has done, says one reviewer, is “bring us back to our beginnings—and our endings” in a work which Beveridge says is meant to be reassuring, a peaceful work about the experience of death.

BEVERIDGE: I mean we are the ones who are left. We’re the ones who have to deal with this event in our lives and to try to understand it, try to find a way, through ritual or through musical experience, of coming to terms with it.

FAW: A spiritual lesson in music—bridging traditions which differ, but which also experience the same thing and which here come together as one.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly this is Bob Faw in Washington.

RABBI IRWIN KULA (National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership): The central ritual on Yom Kippur, besides prayer itself, that’s most well-known, is fasting. What fasting does is it says I’m not going to concentrate on my physical body right now. I’m going to concentrate on a different kind of food. Rather than nutrients for my body, I’m going to concentrate on the nutrients for my spirit, and my heart, and my ethical way.

So when you feel hungry at two o’clock in the afternoon, the feeling of hunger is not so that you’ll be in pain. The feeling of hunger is to stimulate two things: What am I really hungry for—because it’s more than just food. What am I really hungry for in my spiritual and ethical life? And who really is hungry that I need to feed? And if you take those two insights from the practice seriously, it’s working. That’s what atonement—that is what “at-one-ment” means.

Kol Nidre is the first prayer of the Yom Kippur service. What we do on Kol Nidre is the confrontation and the challenge of having to look at every promise and obligation and commitment that I have in my life and starting by saying okay, fine. You have none of them. You have no obligations, no promises. Kol Nidre—all the promises are null and void. Okay, now what? It’s very frightening to imagine that we have no obligations, because it is our obligations, our promises that define who we are.

The rest of Yom Kippur, in a sense, is taking back the obligations, reassessing them. Okay, I am married—do I want to be married? What does it mean to have that obligation? Hey, I am a father—what are the obligations that come with being a father that may have gotten distorted in between last Yom Kippur and this Yom Kippur? What are my obligations to my work and my craft and my calling? What are my obligations, what are the promises that I’ve made to myself? So Kol Nidre is a very profound method and technology for stripping us of all promises and obligations that may distort us, so that we stand there naked, just us, with the ability to take back promises, take back obligations over the next 25 hours.

The focus of the High Holiday period is not on death. The focus is on life. It turns out that one of the great ways to focus ourselves on life is to think about death. That just turns out to be the paradox. So if on Yom Kippur we fast, if on Yom Kippur we deny ourselves certain bodily pleasures and engage in a kind of deep introspection on the moral, psychological, and spiritual level, well, it turns out we will become better people. I mean, that’s just what happens. But, again, there are no guarantees. You can go through everything on Yom Kippur and go through the motions, and on the other hand you can sit in Yom Kippur and never use a prayer book but just really think about who you are and it can make a difference in your life.

RABBI IRWIN KULA (President, National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership): I think one of the interesting things about Rosh Hashanah in general and about the High Holiday period is that the celebratory aspect, which is Rosh Hashanah and the celebration of the New Year, actually comes before the atonement focus, which is Yom Kippur. So you come out of Rosh Hashanah and say, “New Year. Everything’s sweet. It’s amazing. Life is good,” and then okay, well, given that, why not check out who I am?

Teshuva is this process over Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in which we return to that place deep, deep down of who we really want to be, and so everything having to do with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, all the prayers and all the liturgical readings and all the readings from scripture and the variety of practices, whether it’s blowing a shofar, or on Yom Kippur it’s fasting and staying in the synagogue for most of the day, all of the practices are designed to help us make teshuva, return to that deepest path that we know we want to be on.

There really are three basic questions that these 10 days invite us to think about. One is can I change as a human being? Can I really become better? And the second question is, is forgiveness possible? Can I forgive other people and can I feel forgiven? And the third question that runs through all of these days is am I accountable for my behavior?

In the central prayer of Rosh Hashanah-Yom Kippur, “Who shall live, and who shall die,” in that prayer it says on Rosh Hashanah it is written—in other words your fate, your destiny, in a sense, is written down, is inscribed—and on Yom Kippur it’s sealed.

Our behavior does affect the nature of our life. I don’t know if it affects whether we literally live or die, but it surely affects whether we live or whether we die in life.

If Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur work, at the end of Yom Kippur there’s a final blast. The last thing on Yom Kippur is a final long blast of the shofar, and at that moment I should feel two things exactly at the same time. One is I am really perfect and loved just the way I am, and I can do better, and to hold those two things together—I’m perfect and loved just as I am, and I can do better—is the process of teshuva working.

This period is called either the High Holy Days, the High Holidays, the Awesome Days, and they incorporate the days of Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, and then ten days in between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which are called the ten days of repentance, and then Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. There really are three basic questions that these ten days invite us to think about. One is can I change as a human being? Can I really become better? I think that’s a really hard question to ask. Can I become better or is this the way it is and I’m doing the best I can, and that’s it? And the second question is, is forgiveness possible? Can I forgive other people, and can I feel forgiven? I think that’s also a very difficult question. We talk a lot about forgiveness and wanting to be forgiven and to forgive other people, but it’s really hard. And the third question that runs through all of these days is am I accountable for my behavior? And whether you believe in a God in the sky or the cosmos or reality or the universe or whatever it is your belief system is, do you actually believe that you’re accountable for how you behave? And I think those three questions and themes run through the entire High Holy Day period.

Rabbi Irwin Kula

Can I really change? Can forgiveness be real in my life, and can I be accountable? You just can’t answer those questions. You actually have to practice answering them, and so it turns out that the 30 days before Rosh Hashanah—really the 40 days before Yom Kippur—are days devoted to practicing in those three areas. So, we actually practice asking what changes in our behavior do we have to make that would be more aligned with who we imagine we ought to be, who we think God wants us to be. We practice forgiveness. In other words, you can’t come on Yom Kippur, on the Day of Atonement, and expect some spiritual forgiveness experience without first preparing by asking people for forgiveness for things that you’ve done and by granting forgiveness to people who have done things to you. And, finally, unless you actually begin to think about your behavior and what you are accountable for and what have been the consequences of the previous year’s behavior, you’re not going to have a Yom Kippur experience.

The practice amongst the many practices in the forty days prior to Yom Kippur, first and foremost, [is] what I call a kind of spiritual, moral, or ethical inventory, and that is to go through one’s life, the different areas in one’s life. First, the family, family relationships, the most intimate relationships, extending out to friendships, then work relationships and how one is operating at work with other people and the work one is doing. Then the larger community, world, nature—to actually go through those areas. My practice, and the practice that I suggest, is to take two things. Take your checkbook and take your Day-Timer or Blackberry calendar and to look—how did I use my time this year? Because that says a lot about who we are. And how did I use my money this year? So there’s that piece, which is part of the practice in preparation, and then to actually recognize about where one is and ask people for forgiveness, and that means literally picking up the phone and saying “Hey, you know what? Earlier this year, I know, I dissed you” or “I did something that was very inappropriate,” or “I took credit for something,” whatever it is, or “I ignored you,” and to be able to come to terms and ask for forgiveness. It turns out the more you practice and prepare for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the richer that experience is.

In more traditional communities, in the mornings of the week before Rosh Hashanah there are penitential prayers. Those are prayers in which one asks for forgiveness, and it’s a kind of asking for forgiveness in general, in the hope that it’ll stimulate where, specifically, I need to ask for forgiveness, and that’s every morning for the week before. There’s also another practice starting the month before Rosh Hashanah—in other words, those forty days prior to Yom Kippur—of blowing the shofar, which is one of the central symbols of the High Holiday experience, blowing the shofar at the end of the morning prayer service, and the shofar is just a blast of the ram’s horn, and it, in a sense, wakes you up. You’re not used to hearing a blast of a ram’s horn, and it is supposed to cause you to become more alert to your own behavior.

What the Jewish wisdom tradition invites us to think is that before one can actually approach God, or what I call kind of the “vertical dimension,” one has to have the horizontal dimension in order. I would say it this way, that the moral alignment between us as individuals is a necessary component and base for the spiritual relationship that we want. I once heard a story about the Dalai Lama. He came to the United States, one of his first trips, and they brought him to a meditation center, and what struck him was that people were engaged in spiritual practice who hadn’t developed an ethical practice, and he said this was the first time he ever saw spiritual practice being built and created independent of ethical practice, and I think that most religious traditions and most spiritual wisdom traditions would suggest that the alienation or the disconnection between us and God is actually a consequence and a function of a deep disconnection between us and other human beings, and so the practice in Jewish life is you can’t come to God on Yom Kippur and ask for forgiveness or ask for a realignment in the relationship if you haven’t done the work between you and other human beings.

Changing your fate for the coming year is a part of a larger question: Do we believe that our behavior actually affects our destiny? Now we have to understand that in a fairly careful way because there’s not a direct cause-effect correspondence that we can generally pick up: “If I’m good, there’ll be no sickness; if I’m bad, I’ll be punished.” Well, it turns out that we know, most of us, that life doesn’t move that easily, and cause-effect is not that clean. But there’s a deeper sense, I think, at least in my experience, and I think this is most people’s experience, there’s a deeper sense that there’s a relationship between my behavior and my destiny, in how I feel about myself, in how I approach the world, in that whatever happens to me somehow I’m capable of dealing with what happens to me at a higher, more evolved level if my behavior is correct and aligned with the things and values that I hold most deeply. So there’s a sense on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in which thousands of people gather together and go through many, many prayers in which we ask ourselves, “How have I done?” For illuminating and actually elucidating the variety of potential sins, and the word for sin in Hebrew is “chet,” which means “missing the mark,” the places where I’ve missed the mark and the sense that if I can discover some of those places and begin to correct them that my destiny will actually be better.

No matter what path you’re on, the path is always filled with unpredictability. The path is always filled with things that we can’t control and places that we can’t control. But what we can really control, as best we can, is our behavior up front and our responses to other people, and responses to the unpredictability and vulnerability and fragility in life. And Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur invite us to think about that. One of the most important prayers on both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur comes right at the center of the worship service, when the most people are in the synagogue, is a prayer “Who shall live, and who shall die?” And that’s a question that we don’t often ask ourselves, and I don’t think we should ask it every day; if you ask it every day, it would be a little crazy. But once a year to come clean, to look around and say, “You know what? There’ are no guarantees here. There is a fragility to our lives. Given that, how do I want to live?” If I look at my job, I look at my spouse, I look at my friend, I look at my parents, and I say “Wow, what is really true about life or death is that I don’t know, no matter what I do, no matter how good I take care of people, I don’t know if next year at this time everybody’s going to be here.” Well, given that, what are my obligations? How do I want to treat the people both close to me, and how do I want to act in a world in which I may not be here a year from now? Now, confronting our mortality up front and surfacing the anxiety that that does produce, and then asking who do I want to be—given that, generally speaking, helps us become more ethical human beings and much more sensitive to life.

We know that we’re not going to be able to change everything, and, of course, the paradox is that we’ll probably be here the following Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, probably saying the exact same prayers and probably, for most of the things that we tried to change, having not been so successful. But part of what it means to be a human being is to stay in that game, to believe that yes, we can change, that the change happens incrementally, to not imagine that your life is over because you haven’t made those changes, and that’s part of the message of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. When I get to the service on Rosh Hashanah morning and get to those prayers that I know I said the exact same prayers—I’m 51-one years old—I remember saying them probably consciously since I’m about seven or eight. And it’s funny, pretty much for the last 25-30 years it’s the same ones that I’m still working on, you know? How to be a little bit more patient with the people I care about, how to be a little less oriented towards being in conflict with the people with whom I deeply disagree, how to be a little bit more generous and a little less ego-centered. So, you know, these are the ongoing dilemmas, and I think that if you have a regular, set time in a year, or even in a week or in a day, but here we’re talking about the High Holidays, if you have a regular, set time in which a community comes together by the thousands to do a little introspection and ask how am I aligned with other human beings, how am I aligned with God, and how am I aligned with who I deeply want to be, chances are we’ll be a little bit better.

The central activity of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the activity that defines almost everything that’s happening, is the word “teshuva.” Teshuva comes from the word, “shuv,” which means “to return,” and there’s this sense that deep down, deep, deep, deep, deep down, you know, in the privacy of your own heart and your own soul and mind and spirit, we know we want to be good people, deep down. But what happens in life is things get distorted, and we get hurt, and we become fearful and filled with anxiety and scared, and so we don’t act in light of what deep, deep, deep down we know we can be and want to be. Teshuva is this process over Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in which we return to that place deep, deep down of who we really want to be, and so everything having to do with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, all the prayers and all the liturgical readings and all the readings from scripture and the variety of practices, whether it’s blowing a shofar, or on Yom Kippur it’s fasting and staying in synagogue for most of the day, all of the practices are designed to help us make teshuva, return to that deepest path that we know we want to be on.

“Repent” would be a more Protestant or Christian term for the word for teshuva. We don’t actually have—there’s no word “repent” that way. But repent means to try to make up for what you do. We have a process in Jewish wisdom, and Maimonides was the most important articulator of this, we have a process of gaining forgiveness that I call the four R’s, and the first is to realize what one has done. You know, until you realize what you’ve done wrong, you can’t do anything about it, and realization is really hard. You know, you can tell a person they’ve done wrong, and a person can tell me “you did something wrong, you did something wrong.” But until you see it and realize it, you’re not in the game, the forgiveness game. So the first is to realize. The next is to regret, actually, that I did it. The next thing is to attempt to repair. Sometimes that repair is in a conversation. Sometimes that repair is in financial remuneration. Sometimes that repair is in actually diminishing myself a little bit to allow a realignment in the relationship and changing my behavior, and only then is there the fourth R—reconciliation, and it’s those four R’s together, which is the process of forgiveness, which for us, for Jews, is what we mean by repentance.

The last thing on Yom Kippur is a final long blast of the shofar, and at that moment I should feel two things exactly at the same time. One is I am really perfect and loved just the way I am, and I can do better, and to hold those two things together—I’m perfect and loved just as I am, and I can do better—is the process of teshuva working.

On Rosh Hashanah afternoon, after having been in synagogue most of the day and then coming and having a festive New Year’s meal, a practice developed called Tashlikh, from the word, l’hashlikh, to cast away or to throw away, and it is, like all ritual, a theatrical re-enactment, and we go to a brook or a river or a stream or an ocean, a body of water, and we symbolically, either taking bread or something, cast away our sins into the water, and, of course, the water carries them away, and having been in this process of teshuva, this process of spiritual and moral inventory, over the last thirty days, and now anticipating the next ten days to actually physically remove and cast away and stand at water that is a cleansing symbol to begin with, that carries away, in a sense, our sins is a very powerful interior, in a sense, re-enactment together as a community. So, literally, you just stand at the water and from young to old take a crumb of bread and throw it into the water. And there’s a passage that says “Cast away my sins, cast away my sins.” And then, very often, since it’s done kind of late afternoon and the sun is beginning to set, very often birds will come and they’ll take the bread away, and it has a wonderful theatrical feel and a sense of liberation, that my sins are being removed from me. And what that’s really saying is that I may sin, but I’m not sinful. And I think that’s a piece of the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur experience. Very often, for ourselves and for other people, we confuse doing bad things with being bad people. And I’m not sure, really, if we can evolve and grow morally and psychologically and spiritually as long as we think we are bad people. We’re people who, very often, do bad things, who very often sin but have the capacity to cast away that sin, to work through those mistakes and become better people.

One of the interesting things about Rosh Hashanah in general and about the High Holiday period is that the celebratory aspect, which is Rosh Hashanah and the celebration of the New Year, actually comes before the atonement focus, which is Yom Kippur. One would expect that first I have to atone, first I have to make sure I’ve come to terms with who I am, and I’ve realized and regretted and repaired and gotten better, and then I get to celebrate. In fact, the Jewish calendar runs it in reverse. First we’re going to celebrate the New Year. Now in the context of celebration of a New Year, the change really is possible. Now let’s get down to the business of change. And I think pedagogically and methodologically and psychologically that’s a very, very important move. First, everything’s going to be okay. Now let’s work on things, as opposed to let’s work on things and see if everything’s going to be okay.

On Yom Kippur, five times during the day there’s a confessional, there’s a list of “for the sin that I did with my mouth, for the sin that I did with my eyes, for the sin that I did by stealing, for the sin that I did with arrogance,” and there’s five times during the Yom Kippur service one goes through, one goes “Al Khet” for the sin. It’s a practice of hitting one’s heart, kind of to get the heart going, that type of idea, and what’s interesting is almost all of the sins recognized are between human beings. They are not between the human being and God. On Yom Kippur, this intense, spiritual, introspective day, the vast majority of sins that are evoked or attempted to bring to consciousness are between human beings, which is a way of saying that if you really want to know God, you’d better start with the most visible symbol and image of God available, which is other human beings.

Atonement is really just a fancy word for the forgiveness process. The word Yom Kippurim, from the word “kappare,” really means to be engaged in this forgiveness process. Atonement is just a fancy word for “at one.” If you engage in forgiveness, if you do the introspection that is required during this period you will feel more at one with yourself, at one with other people, at one with the cosmos, or reality, or the universe, or God, whatever it is you call it. And that “at-one-ment,” that alignment is the goal of the Rosh Hashanah-Yom Kippur period.

In the central prayer of Rosh Hashanah Yom Kippur, “Who shall live and who shall die,” in that prayer it says on Rosh Hashanah it is written (in other words your fate, your destiny is written down, is inscribed), and on Yom Kippur it’s sealed. And there is this sense, and again, whether one believes it literally or as a deep metaphor, the only issue for me is, do you take it seriously, and that our behavior does affect the nature of our life. I don’t know if it affects whether we literally live or die, but it surely affects whether we live or whether we die in life. In that respect, there’s the sense that on Rosh Hashanah, who we are going to be based on, how we make this assessment, is written down. And, yet, then you have another ten days in which to really go through that process even more deeply of asking who you are, and then it gets sealed. And “gets sealed” doesn’t mean that it’s closed forever, because of course, the paradox, or the joke, or the irony, or the, you know, in Jewish wisdom there’s as many traditions that say but it’s really not sealed until the end of the whole holiday period, or three weeks later, at the end of the Festival of Tabernacles and Simchat Torah, that it’s really not sealed. And even then it’s really not sealed, because every morning you go through a practice in which you ask for forgiveness. So “sealed” is a way of saying something does happen if you spend a full day on Yom Kippur and you spend full days on Rosh Hashanah, the forty days and the process of engaging in teshuvah and forgiveness, something does happen, and there’s a feeling that if I’ve missed that or not done it right, that it does affect who we are. It does affect our destiny.

The focus of the High Holiday period is not on death. The focus is on life. It turns out that one of the great ways to focus ourselves on life is to think about death. That just turns out to be the paradox. So if on Yom Kippur we fast, if on Yom Kippur we deny ourselves certain bodily pleasures and engage in a kind of deep introspection on the moral, psychological, and spiritual level, well, it turns out we will become better people. I mean, that’s just what happens, but again there are no guarantees. You can go through everything on Yom Kippur and go through the motions, and on the other hand you can sit in Yom Kippur and never use a prayer book, but just really think about who you are, and it can make a difference in your life.

Part of the ritual on Yom Kippur is by denying yourself these variety of bodily activities, eating, making love, washing, one begins to simulate in a way one’s bodily death, and, you know, by the end of the day on Yom Kippur, that hour before the final shofar blowing at sunset, people, you know, their faces are a little more craggy and their beards a little bit—and they’re running on empty a little bit, and one discovers that there’s a deeper life than simply the physical life. And if we can tap into that life, which I think every religious and spiritual wisdom tradition tries to do, to tap into that deeper dimension of life beyond just the material and physical and body, there is a deeper or new life that emerges, and that final blow of the shofar, and the shofar blow is only dependent on one’s breath; there’s no notes, you know, it’s just the breath of life. Sometimes I call it a kind of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for us. You know, you hear that sound and there is a rebirth and in that respect confronting one’s own mortality, at least for me confronting my own mortality. My mother passed away between last Yom Kippur and this Yom Kippur, and I know that, for me, that will be central in my mind. One of the major prayers in Yom Kippur is what’s called Yizkor, “to remember,” and the community as a whole remembers people who they loved and who’ve passed away, and you take that twenty minutes in the middle of the day and you remember someone who died and a lot of thoughts go, like, how did I really operate with that person and what do I need to do differently, and with time being so short, how do I want to love, and how do I want to be more compassionate, and how do I want to be there? And so it turns out confrontation with death is one of the great methodologies to make us appreciate life.

The central ritual on Yom Kippur, besides prayer itself, that’s most well known is fasting. Every single tradition has fasting. What fasting does is it says I’m not going to concentrate on my physical body right now. I’m going to concentrate on a different kind of food. Rather than nutrients for my body, I’m going to concentrate on the nutrients for my spirit, my heart, and my ethical way, and that surely does help. We know there’s physical aspects to this, too. If you don’t eat, certain ego structures begin to loosen up and you’re a little bit more open. I mean, it turns out there’s a lot more tears Yom Kippur afternoon when we talk about our lives than there are Yom Kippur morning, because in the end when one doesn’t eat, one’s a little bit less in control of all of the structures we build to defend against difficult truths, to defend against insights and illuminations that are going to cause pain and will force us to think about our lives in different ways. So we fast as a way to become more in tune with our spiritual and our inner life.

The most visible, really the only symbol of Rosh Hashanah, is the ram’s horn, which is blown—100 different sounds or times is it blown. There are three basic sounds to the Rosh Hashanah. One is a longer sound. That sound then is broken up into three, and that sound is broken up into nine, and each sound stimulates a kind of call. One is more plaintive, one is more a little bit frenzied, with more anxiety, and those calls together are to evoke and to wake us up. “Arise from the slumber” is what Maimonides says the shofar sounds are supposed to do, and there’ll be 1000 people or 2000 people in the room, in the synagogue, and it is perfectly silent except for the sound of the shofar that’s piercing through all of the armor, so to speak, the internal armor that we construct to avoid hearing the deepest call of our life, which is to be decent human beings.

On Yom Kippur, there’s no shofar blowing until the very, very last act at sunset. The sun is set, Yom Kippur ends. The ending of Yom Kippur is the reciting of “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one,” “God is God,” and that’s recited one time, another thing is recited three times, another thing is recited seven, but at the end of Yom Kippur the very final act is the longest blow of the entire High Holiday period, and it’s just one long blow.

Kol Nidre is the first prayer of the Yom Kippur service, which begins at evening and extends to the next night at sunset. Kol Nidre means “all my promises,” and it’s a paragraph in which the congregation comes together and says all the promises, all the obligations, all the bonds that I have made this year, all of them should be dissolved. Now, what that is really about is it’s making a claim that if I’m really going to assess who I am, I have to look at every promise, every obligation, every commitment that I’ve made, because that’s what defines us—our promises, our obligations, our commitments….It’s very frightening to imagine that we have no obligations…Now, once one has that experience, by the end of the Kol Nidre, which lasts about 10-15 minutes, it’s sung three times by the cantor in a very dramatic way, at the end of that all of my promises, all of my obligations are nullified. The rest of Yom Kippur, in a sense, is taking back the obligations, reassessing them….And as Yom Kippur unfolds, one takes back one’s promises in new commitments….So Kol Nidre is a very profound method and technology for stripping us of all promises and obligations that may distort us so that we stand there naked, just us, with the ability to take back promises, take back obligations over the next 25 hours….You’ve got no responsibilities now. You have no promises, no obligations. They’re all null and void. Now, who do you want to be?

RAHIMA ULLAH: This week it’s towards the end of summer, and we were lucky enough to be able to enroll in this summer horseback riding camp. My sister, Jasmin, is the 16-year-old, and my eight-year-old daughter, Sakina, they’re both in the camp spiritually and mentally preparing for Ramadan in this natural setting. For me nature, and for Muslims in general, nature is this great, awesome sign of God’s creation. Muslims are very excited about Ramadan. A lot of people will describe it in a metaphorical sense of as expecting a month-long guest because of all the excitement surrounding it in terms of being with your family, establishing and reestablishing your relationship with God and those around you.

We follow the lunar calendar, and so every year Ramadan moves up in the year. This year it’s in the summertime. It’s going to be more than twelve hours that – no eating, no drinking the whole day, and you’re still supposed to do all the things that you’d normally do. So, yeah, it’s a challenge, definitely, but I’m still looking forward to it.

Two of the things that people look forward to every year during Ramadan would be the iftars, which is when we break our fasts at the end of the day, at sunset, and then the prayers, the special Ramadan prayers that come after our evening prayers.

JASMIN ULLAH: It’s — you’re supposed to start fasting when you hit puberty, so for guys and girls it’s different ages.

SAKINA AHMAD: I started my fast when I was six. It was hard. I kept on breaking it by accident.

RAHIMA ULLAH: Really, what’s actually encouraged is throughout the year we should be fasting every once in a while as extra fasts.

ABDUL-MALIK AHMAD: I try as much as I can not only to fast in Ramadan but also regularly throughout the year. It’s usually suggested that we fast on Mondays and Thursdays. Those are the days where the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, fasted.

JASMIN ULLAH: And during Ramadan actually being angry and acting on your anger breaks your fast, so it’s very much an emotional discipline as well as a physical discipline.

ABDUL-MALIK AHMAD: The discipline that we practice during Ramadan is the same kind of discipline that we try to promote in the martial arts—restraining from anger, treating people properly, just taking care of yourself spiritually and physically. The martial art style I do is called pencak silat. You’re supposed to use the skills that you learn for peace and for helping other people and not for violent means or violent reasons.

Native Deen music video: “Ramadan in here, Ramadan is here. Alright. it’s a blessed month…”

ABDUL-MALIK AHMAD: As Native Deen, in our songs we try to give Muslims pride about their faith, and we also teach other people a little bit about Islam. One of the things that we really wanted to promote in our song is the feeling of happiness: Ramadan’s here. Get close to God. Fast, but also be happy. It’s a time of hardship, yes, because you’re fasting from sun-up to sundown. But there’s a lot of joy in it. We see families getting together for the iftar or the break-fast.

RAHIMA ULLAH: It’s very special to see that mosque just packed with people. It’s such a warm, wonderful feeling to be around so many people who all have this goal of pleasing God. Even if we think our relationship with God and the people around us are great, there’s always a way to get better. And so Ramadan is that really intense, focused way of doing that, of fasting and working on our own selves and then working on our relationships to others and ultimately our relationship to God.

ABDUL-MALIK AHMAD: There’s a prayer that we always say: “Grant us good in this life and good in the hereafter.” A lot of prayers that we do in Ramadan is really asking us for in the next life, in paradise, in heaven, that we attain the highest levels of heaven, to maybe see our beloved Prophet Muhammad when we’re there.

RABBI NISSEN BRENENSON (Director of Education, Jewish Children’s Museum, Brooklyn, NY): As you approach the museum, the first thing you see is a giant photo mosaic, and as you get closer you realize that it’s made up of thousands and thousands of smaller photographs of children of all ages, of all races. Then that contains a special message, and that is that we’re really one.

The gallery on the six days of Creation and the Shabbat, the Sabbath, contains a Shabbat table where you’re actually walking on the table. There are Shabbat candlesticks, a giant crawl-through challah tunnel. Inside the tunnel, you can learn about the ingredients, the significance, of the special challah bread.

Hanukkah is also a favorite. We have an olive oil pressing station where children can actually squeeze their own olive oil. They like to do that, and the olive oil represents the miracle of the oil that happened at the time of the Hanukkah story.

I think we have the world’s only touch-screen Seder plate, and by pressing the screen and selecting the various symbolic items on the Seder plate, the children can watch short clips of what these symbols represent and the story of Passover.

The holiday of trees is called Tu B’Shvat, and here at the museum we have our own special talking Tu B’Shvat tree:

Talking Tree: Tu B’Shvat is my birthday.

RABBI BRENENSON: He’s sort of a storyteller and explains how man is compared to a tree in many ways. We have our roots, and that’s our faith, and we also have our fruits, and those are the good deeds that we perform.

The journey continues into our kosher supermarket, where children can scan products. Instead of coming up with prices, there are trivia questions about the kosher diet as well as a full-scale kosher kitchen.

The last gallery on that floor focuses on values that are rooted in Jewish tradition but have also become universal, such as kindness—kindness to others, kindness to animals, respecting the environment, charity.

RABBI LAWRENCE TROSTER (GreenFaith): To be bar-mitzvahed is to come of age in the Jewish tradition. For women, it’s bat mitzvah. Many years ago, the rabbis had to create, what you might say, a legal definition of what it meant to be an adult, and they picked twelve for a girl and thirteen for a boy, and in the last few hundred years this has become really a rite of passage in our communities, a way to publicly proclaim that this person is now an adult member of our community, and we do that symbolically by calling them to the Torah, to have them read a Torah portion. It means that we are now fully responsible for our actions, that we are part of the covenanted community, that we are expected to live up to the Jewish tradition. In other words, a child is not culpable for things they don’t do or do wrong, but an adult is.

I think it is a good fit that we use the bar mitzvah or the bat mitzvah as a way to inculcate environmental values. Protecting the earth is a mitzvah, and I mean this in the sense of a commandment. In other words, that we are commanded, we are required, to take care of creation. It’s not a choice.

ANNA HACKMAN (Bar Mitzvah Mother and Editor, GreenTalk.com): This is my third bar mitzvah—I have four sons—and I took a look at this bar mitzvah for more of a carbon footprint, like what was I doing that was impacting the Earth, that I could make a difference?

One of the most important parts is the tallis. It’s something that he wears during the service. It’s something he’s going to have his whole lifetime. It’s made out of organic cotton. It was hand-woven, and it symbolizes things about him, and his yarmulke was made by Guatemalan women that actually are paid fair-trade wages, and these wages help support their families. The other yarmulkes, I had them made out of hemp, and they’re all lined with organic cotton.

At the service there’s a program. It’s all made out of 100 percent recycled paper. The invitation’s a Web site with places for people to RSVP. It’s got pictures of Jacob. It’s got polls and quizzes, and the best thing is there’s no paper being used. There’s nobody mailing things back and forth to me. On the invitation, I put a note on the bottom to please try and carpool to cut down on the consumption of natural resources.

The theme is a movie theme, so what I did is I went and bought used DVDs as place markers for everybody to pick up when they come and look for their tables, so it’s something that they could take home and watch. They’re not going to throw it in the trash like a little paper, you know, place card.

We chose to put on the tables soy candles that are a renewable source, and they burn much cleaner. There’s not toxic chemicals coming from, like, wax candles.

The centerpieces are actual plants that are going to be planted in my garden. I made sure that they were ones that would live, so nothing’s wasted.

We’re serving three different meals. Everything was sourced either locally or was and/or organic. The leftover food is composted, or the balance of the food is donated to a food pantry.

The dress that you can see that I’m wearing, it’s a consignment dress. People wear dresses once for bar mitzvahs, and to me it’s senseless.

My goal to make this bar mitzvah greener is to let the world know that they can do it, being able to take my religion and say yeah, I’m part of that. It’s just another connection for me that makes me feel more vibrant as a Jew.

KIM LAWTON, anchor: Interfaith marriage has become commonplace in this country. But, for a long time, when it came to the wedding ceremony, many couples felt they had to pick just one religious tradition, the bride’s or the groom’s — or none at all.  Today, brides and grooms are finding new ways to incorporate both their religions. Betty Rollin has our story.

BETTY ROLLIN: Sunitha Mani is an Indian Hindu, born in America. Her mother calls her a modern girl. Even so, as she prepares for her marriage, she is going the traditional route, and then some. It begins with her getting painted with henna, a process called “mehndi.” Sanjana, the marital makeup chief, explains:

SANJANA PURSNANI (Makeup Director, Sona Salon): When it dries up and it starts flaking it gives you that mahogany, like a red burgundy color. So in India the bridal colors are red. We usually wear red, maroon, burgundy, so they say that the bride’s hand shouldn’t show color of her skin.

ROLLIN: Sunitha met her husband-to-be, Ronjit Sandhu, who is a Sikh, at college eight years ago.

SUNITHA MANI (Bride): The henna artists told me yesterday the darker the henna the more your husband and your in-laws love you, so my hands are dark, but not down here so much.

ROLLIN: The groom’s mandate on the wedding night is to find his name hidden in the design.

RONJIT SANDHU (Groom): The night of the wedding, I’m supposed to find — I’m supposed to search for my name in the henna, and then if I can’t find it, basically I’m not allowed to consummate our marriage.

Bride and groom

ROLLIN: The next pre-marriage ritual performed is the puja, where the bride’s family’s Hindu pandit prays before a sacred fire.

Pandit BALU DIXIT (Hindu Temple, Albany, NY): We pray to Lord Ganesha asking for his blessings, so that everything goes very smoothly without any obstacles.

ROLLIN: When Sunitha’s parents married, not only were they required to be of the same faith, but they were expected to marry the person their parents chose.

KANTHI MANI (Mother of Bride): We got married, what, 36 years ago. I think it was through communication between my parents and his parents, and they looked at the horoscope, and once it was agreed, he came to visit me, and that’s it. I hardly knew him until I got married.

ROLLIN: And how do the Manis feel about their daughter marrying outside their faith?

Dr. SRINIVASAN MANI (Father of Bride): Whatever makes our daughter happy and secure in the future, that’s what matters, rather than our discomfort.

ROLLIN: The groom’s father, now a widower, and his aunt also have had some concerns.

Satwant Kaur Banga

SURJIT SINGH SANDHU (Father of Groom): Not having the same culture and the language, sometimes it’s hard to interact.

SATWANT KAUR BANGA (Aunt of Groom): I think that as soon as you hear of a child marrying into a different religion, even though Sikhism absolutely tells there’s only one God and all people are equal, the cultural differences — they creep in after the children come in.

Mr. S. SANDHU: Ideally, you know, you want your kids to be raised as Sikhs, but then again once you are out of India, you know, our kids now are raised in this culture. So in this culture, their culture is the same.

ROLLIN: Ronjit has his own ideas about what his childrens’ religion will be.

Mr. R. SANDHU: I think they’ll definitely be raised under both religions. You know, they are going to go to temple, they are going to go to gurdwara, the Sikh version of a temple. They will essentially learn, you know, about the histories behind both of the religions. Her parents are very religious, so whether we wanted them or not, they will probably share everything they know. They share it with me openly, so I’m sure they will definitely do it with our grandkids.

ROLLIN: The couple decided there was one obvious way to smooth over the religious differences: two weddings — one Sikh, one Hindu.

The Sikh wedding came first, with the groom making his entrance on a white horse named Max. The procession is called a “baraat.” The bride’s extended Hindu family awaits his arrival.

The families greet each other with an elaborate garland exchange. And here comes the bride.

Wedding elephant

And three hours later, here comes the bride again.

Two weddings — one in Sanskrit, one in Punjabi. Countless rituals; two receptions; decorations involving hundreds of yards of fabric; banquets; music of two cultures; 400 guests and a costumed horse.

Putting this together takes a commander-in-chief, otherwise known as a wedding planner. That would be Sonal Shah and her small army of lieutenants.

SONAL SHAH (Interfaith Wedding Planner, Save the Date Event Consultants): Don’t forget to tell everyone to take their shoes off, cover their head.

When she began her profession one religion was the norm. Not anymore.

Ms. SHAH: In the last five years since I started doing wedding planning, interfaith marriages have just skyrocketed. Out of the 25 or 30 weddings we do in a year, right now about half of them, if not more than half, are interfaith marriages. One of the biggest problems that we face is the whole meat/non-meat issue. So, you know, we did a wedding last year where the groom was Irish and the bride was Gradrati Indian, and her family, you know, strict Jains — no meat, no potatoes. And his side of the family is Irish, so obviously they want those things. We really just try to come to a consensus.

(to Ms. Shah): What did you do?

Ms. SHAH: We ended up going with the non-meat. But obviously they weren’t happy about it because their guest list consisted of everybody that, you know, ate meat and potatoes!

ROLLIN: At the Mani-Sandhu wedding there was also a meat issue, since Hindus are vegetarians, but meat won out.

And then there is the animal issue. At a recent wedding Sonal supervised in Washington, D.C., a Hindu groom wanted to make his entrance on an elephant.

Wedding guest

Ms. SHAH: It definitely posed a lot of challenges. But, yes, we found an elephant. We had the elephant brought over on a semi to downtown Washington, D.C. on Pennsylvania Avenue. So it was very exciting. But it was, literally — the last six months of the wedding all we were worried about was this elephant.

ROLLIN: Back at the Mani-Sandhu wedding, Sonal has made sure that the two weddings faithfully represent the two religions.

At the Sikh wedding, men and women sit separately on the floor — shoes off, heads covered. The service centers around the Sikh holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib.

Ms. BANGA: The bride and the groom, they go around the guru, keeping in mind that the guru or God is the center. All their life, because of this way, they will be very easily able to mend their differences if that’s what they keep in mind.

ROLLIN: At the Hindu wedding the bride groom also do a walk-around.

Pandit DIXIT: So that completion of the seven rounds around the fire signifies that they are married, and that concludes with the ceremony where the groom offers a necklace, ties a necklace to the bride and usually they put a little dot, like a kumkum, a sindur of the forehead of the bride, and that means she’s a married woman from then on.

ROLLIN: At the end of the Hindu service, the Sikh elders were invited to join in blessing the bride and groom, showering them with rice, flowers, and spices for fertility, happiness, and peace.

The bride’s hands are painted with henna.

Mr. S. SANDHU: As long as, you know, they will respect each other, not only as an individual but also respect each other’s customs and religion, you know — let the kids learn the better of both sides, and I think they will be stronger.

ROLLIN (to Mr. S. Sandhu): Did it take you awhile to come to this?

Mr. S. SANDHU: Yes. You know, your initial reaction is, you know, you would rather have things, you know, go your way, let it be simple. But reality is not always simple.

ROLLIN: This three-day celebration does come to an end, and Ronjit and Sunitha will be off to Hawaii for their honeymoon, knowing that they have the blessings and acceptance of both families.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Betty Rollin in Utica, New York.