Robert Garber’s Rosh Hashanah Message for 2026

I was recently subbing at my synagogue’s Hebrew school for a group of first graders, when one of them asked me an interesting question – “Why do we wear kippahs?”
I answered as honestly as I could – that it had been a tradition for Jewish men for over a thousand years, but beyond that, he should ask the rabbi.
I don’t know if that answer was sufficient – to say “it is because it has been.” If he was asking why it started, why it kept going, or why it mattered now, was that really an answer at all?
Should I have given him the Talmudic story of the boy and the fruit tree, or the reasoning of Maimonides for decorum during prayer, or David HaLevi’s explanation that they should be used to distinguish us from non-Jews – and should I have mentioned that all of these reasons were first recorded decades or centuries after we started wearing them?
I’ve long thought the value of our traditions is the connection between us and our ancestors who, for whatever reason they chose or later determined, continued the practice of those that came before them. I can see a long line stretching back thousands of years of the same practices, generation after generation. Perhaps this shared history is the importance of at least one aspect of Judaism – our communal culture. But if we do not have our own reasons, do we risk these become empty connections?
With the High Holidays approaching, and a day of fasting we have observed, year after year, for thousands of years, I think of a quote from the Book of Isaiah (58: 5-7), of a time where people practiced the physical tradition, but without a spiritual reason:
“Is such the fast I desire, a day for people to starve their bodies? … No, this is the fast I desire: to unlock the fetters of wickedness, and untie the cords of the yoke…It is to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your home.”
I don’t think the reasons we observe our traditions need to be the same reasons our parents held or our children will hold. But to be able to say, “this is why I do it, and this is why our ancestors did it, and now it is up to you to find your own reason why”? Maybe that is the start of a sufficient answer.

Robert Garber is the Online Content Coordinator for Atlanta Jewish Times.