Insert Toes in Sand Here

This past Monday, I traveled to the city of Dunedin to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. Dunedin is a small port city here on the South Island of New Zealand that was a bustling commercial center in the nineteenth century and which now has a pleasant mix of industry and shipping, together with all the trappings of its modern role as an important university city. Dunedin has little pollution, lots of parks, no traffic, and lots of bungalow style single-family homes and tidy little retail buildings along the sea wall in the St. Clair neighborhood where my friends live. Consider that all of this is a short stroll from a great surf beach and it’s all a three hour drive from the great skiing at Treble Cone, and Dunedin certainly provides its residents and visitors with a balance and a lifestyle rarely found. In many respects, these factors combine to make the place feel a bit like Seattle and other towns on the Pacific coast of the US. Dunedin may not be the coolest or most moneyed city in New Zealand, but the residents are justly prideful of their home. As was the case for me Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, any place where I can insert my toes into the sand of an ocean beach less than twelve hours before skiing in a couple of feet of fresh, light, dry powder in high alpine terrain gets my vote.

Traveling the three hours to Dunedin from Wanaka by car, one stays on “major” roads. That is to say that the two lane road that snakes through the rolling hills, orchards, vineyards and pasture-lands of central Otago is a major thoroughfare for the South Island but certainly does not qualify as a highway. Imagine if US Rt. 100 in Vermont were the only means of travel from one end of the state to the other and you’ll be able to put this in perspective. The surrounding countryside (as seen in the photo above) is, like so many places here, astonishingly beautiful. On Monday driving to Dunedin and on Tuesday evening driving back, it was a very green and very welcome relief from the jagged peaks and wind-swept highlands of the Southern Alps where Wanaka is located.

In the few days since returning from celebrating the new year, I’ve been trying to put the holiday and its meaning into perspective in light of the interesting experience of celebrating it with ex-pat English friends in a tiny synagogue on the South Island. I have failed to do so, or at least I have failed to draw from the experience something instructive about it for anyone taking the time to read my blog. Ultimately, my conclusion is that the celebration of Rosh Hashanah, and of Yom Kippur next week, are by nature personal. As Jews, we celebrate them as a community and as congregations, but the High Holy Days for me are a collective way of engaging in personal experience. I am exceptionally grateful to have been able to join my friends, to celebrate the holiday in a congregation which consisted of twenty or so people and may be the only dedicated synagogue on the South Island. Given that my friends are returning to the UK after five years here and are grappling with all that they will be leaving behind in Dunedin and all that they will be finding back home, it was particularly rewarding to visit with them at home as a means of appreciating all that I have been fortunate to see and do over the past year and all of the people who have enriched my life, both here and at home.

Tomorrow, Sunday the 5th of October, is the final day of the 2008 ski season at Treble Cone. There are a lot of the usual festivities on the program – pond skimming, costume wearing, live music, various drink promotions – all of which seem to pale in comparison to the natural signs of Spring’s arrive in full force here in Wanaka. Daylight now extends past eight o’clock in the evening and waterfalls seem to emerge each night from all corners of the mountains we pass to and from work. Ultimately, for me, the High Holy Days are an opportunity to move from one year, one season, one set of circumstances to the next and a joyful way to contemplate what came before and, certainly, what will come next.