Guest Posting By Michoel - Tikkun Yuck

There is an old minhag to have a rosh keves (ram's head) on the table on the first night of Rosh Hashana and to say the yehi ratzon when we eat from it. In the US, the very prevalent minhag is to be yotzei with a fish head, for those that even do all the simanim. I was surprised to hear recently from a friend that the only siman he does is the tapuach with d’vash and he says that he thinks most people do only that. Feh! We go all out. My wife was m’chadesh a few recipes that she only makes Rosh Hashana for the purpose of saying yehi ratzon’s on them and we say them with hislavus.

Anyway, the highlight of our tish is a Rosh Keves. I started buying one soon after we had children. My original impetus was simply that I wanted to keep the minhag in the most authentic way. Being a baal t’shuvah, I didn’t really have a mesora one way or the other so we took on this minhag (bli neder). But another kavana in buying it is what I call Tikkun Yuck. (it has nothing to do with Rebbi Nachman zt”l). Tikkun Yuck has to do with purging “Yuck” from my kids (and my own) personalities. Yuck is an American musag that I consider antithetical to true Yiddishkeit. We don’t kasher beef, we don’t work the land, we don’t even see blood on chickens that often. We sit in front of our PC screens and live highly sanitized lives. I consider it spiritually unhealthful. We should be in touch with ourselves and the world around us. We shouldn’t be so terrified of getting dirty and doing hard physical work. There is something about seeing the head of an animal sitting there on the table, with empty eye sockets, buck teeth, skull showing and gooey membranes that stretch out when you pull off a piece with your fork, that helps straighten out a person’s thinking.

There is another aspect of modern America that I am trying to fix in my kids. It is the perverted idea that killing animals for food is not nice. What shtus! And this ties into all the other nicey-nice wacky hashkafos that leak into the frum community. I want to get across to my kids and myself that we need not be so hypersensitive. We need to live with a little azus d’k’dusha. Animals are here for us to use al pi Torah. An Ish is an Ish, A Yid is a Yid, v’chulu, v’chulu. I don’t want my kids to be wimpy Jews. And the severed head of an animal, something that was commonplace in earlier times, helps to knock out some of that hypersensitivity.

In days before Yom Tov, our very frum block becomes something of a carnival. One family with a fig tree has their kids running around giving all the neighbors fresh figs to make a she’hechiaynu on, wives borrowing last minute cooking items from each other, some people beginning to put up their succos. So in the middle of all this, our rosh keves has become one of the central “tourist attractions”. Kids from the block know that they can come in and chop a peek at “the head”.

So far I am not certain that my tikkun yuck is actually accomplishing what I intended. My kids seem more or less on the same level in these inyanim as their friends. I am not even sure that it is accomplishing what I want in myself and my wife. But one thing I do know for sure. It’s geshmack.

A chasiva v’chasima tova by the blog owner, readership and all the Yidden.