Read on for the full post starting with the importance of gatherings or go straight to the meals with purpose PDF, or jump starlight to Holiday Resources and Recipes or skip straight to my travels to Copenhagen and Johannesburg.

Just in time for the overwhelm that is the High Holy Days period, I have finished reading The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker and it was revolutionary, especially as someone who hosts a lot of gatherings. Every September feels like an extended marathon of cooking, hosting, entertaining, washing dishes, just to do it all again a few hours later. In between all those meals I may get a chance to pray, but that is the exception and not the rule.

In fact, professional gatherer is a better descriptor of what I do in life than “Rabbi’s wife.” Yes, Rebbetzin means Rabbi’s wife. But in my life, and in the lives of the many Rebbetzins I’m privileged to know and teach, we create gatherings, and we do so consistently — in fact, we are experts at gatherings. Gatherings can be anything from a board meeting to a five-year-old’s birthday party, but for me it is most often holiday and Shabbat meals around my table.

When I discussed it with Daniel (said Rabbi), his first thought was funerals — the gathering that he has, over the course of the last eleven years, conducted nearly 500 of. For me it is Friday night dinner, a gathering I host so often that the heading of every one of my menus, Wine & Challah, is the name of this blog. Priya Parker asks us to create purpose for each of our gatherings. She teaches that the purpose, uniqueness, and disputableness of the event is what creates the energy that makes it special and memorable.

A moment on the word “disputable.” Surely we can’t dispute the purpose of a funeral — it is to bury someone who has died. But in fact you can. Is the funeral about remembering the deceased, or is it about comforting the mourners? You may say it’s both, and in some cases it is. In others it is not. What if the deceased wasn’t a very good person, but their loved one is your best friend? What if the deceased has no one to mourn them?

And what of Friday night dinner? Is it to feed people, or is its primary reason to give people a Jewish atmosphere? In some cases it may be to connect long-standing shul members who don’t know each other. In others it may be to share a Jewish experience with Jews from around the world, so that we all feel connected to the larger Jewish community outside our doors.

Judaism, in fact, thrives on disputable purposes — Torah itself is full of arguments “for the sake of heaven.” To see value in multiple perspectives is built into our tradition. That’s why Parker’s idea of disputability resonates so strongly with me.

Having a purpose, and having it be a disputable one, makes it clear who is on the guest list and what activities need to happen in the event to achieve the purpose. The purpose acts like a filter in planning. Everything you decide to include — what you serve or who you invite — will either serve the purpose or detract from it.

Parker asks us to start by focusing on the people, rather than on things — the food, the flowers, the table setting, the music, the lighting, and so on. Asking what are people’s higher needs rather than a logistical set up? Once we know those, all our decisions about the “things” will come much more naturally.

I have always thought of Yom Tov meals as a pattern: recognise the pattern, and hopefully cooking non-stop for a month won’t be so overwhelming. Pattern recognition is useful for me as a cook and as the Rebbetzin who in years past has had to entertain at every meal. My guests don’t know that they may be attending meal 14 out of 22 that I am preparing during the Yom Tov period. They deserve me — and my entertaining — to be as fresh and dedicated to them as the first meal I served Erev Rosh Hashanah.

Pattern recognition and planning help me manage menus, shopping lists, and the sheer logistics of preparing dozens of meals. But it doesn’t help me as the host of real people who have needs beyond being fed. That’s where purpose comes in: it reminds me that each meal isn’t just about getting food on the table, it’s about creating a moment that matters for the people sitting around it.

What Priya Parker has done is ask us to create purpose for each of those events, setting them apart from one another — not, in fact, a copy-and-paste situation.

How do I make purpose-driven gatherings a part of my Yom Tov hosting? I figure, in fact, that Yom Tov gatherings have the purpose built in. And the copy-and-paste of it all isn’t meal to meal, but rather year to year. It’s less about repeating the same kugel or soup, and more about asking: why this meal, with these people, in this year of our lives? Each festival and each table is a new chapter in the larger Jewish story.

First night Rosh Hashanah has a different purpose to first day lunch on Rosh Hashanah. And first night Sukkot has a different purpose to lunch on Simchat Torah. One might be about family intimacy, another about inviting newcomers. One about ritual symbolism, another about community bonding. Each meal can carry its own “why.”

The foods we serve at each of those meals are set by tradition and differ a bit one from the other, sometimes reflecting meaning and other times reflecting season and practicality. Yes, cooking is a marathon, but the entertaining shouldn’t be.

What I will set out is a purpose planner. And let’s see if we, as my mother says, can make “seder” out of the meals on Yom Tov.

Here is a PDF with each of the High Holy Day meals for 2025, and the purpose is to have assigned the meal and a question for the table, I hope it helps inspire your purpose filled meals this holiday season.

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Holiday Resources and Recipes

Before I tell you about my travels last week, let me share a link to a PDF for the Rosh Hashanah Simanim Seder, a few new recipes added to the website this week, and a sample menu for the first night of Rosh Hashanah. Though I’ve just encouraged you to add purpose to each and every meal, people still need to eat!

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Copenhagen, Johannesburg, and the Shape of Belonging

I love Jewish history, because I love Jews. Yes, we can be difficult, yes we can be ornery, we are our own best friends and our worst enemies. When I imagine who I would be if I was born in another time and place, I always imagine myself being born a Jew. It is an integral part of my identity and it is an integral part of my parents and grandparents who handed down that legacy wholesale to the next generation.

My grandparents—one side who fought for personal survival against Hitler, the other that fought for national survival and to reclaim the land of their forebears. And then my parents, who have and continue to do everything in their power to keep us Jewish. My parents’ first lesson was that you can be a Jew literally anywhere in the world. Though we moved around a lot as a young family and our mother tongue was English, my parents always made the choice to send us to a Jewish school, never to the international English-speaking school, valuing Jewish education above all others. And the second lesson: no matter how many non-Jews we met, it was our responsibility to be proud of our Judaism and at the same time respect their beliefs but not integrate them, just learn from them.

Why am I waxing lyrical about parents and traditions? It’s because this past week I had the great privilege to visit two outlying Jewish communities. Though in the same time zone, Copenhagen and Johannesburg are around 6,200 miles (10,000 km) apart; they could not be more different and yet so much the same. It was the winds of immigration that sent our forebears to destinations unknown. They literally threw their lot and lives in with God and followed a relative, a friend, or a hunch that this particular corner would be a safe haven for the Jews. When I imagine a different me born in a different time and place, even as I always imagine myself a Jew, I also imagine a past when my ancestors made different decisions and I ended up as a Jew in a different country today. All of that said, I am grateful for how things turned out, but it was a startling reminder that every decision we make has an effect on future generations.

My husband’s great-grandfather, arriving in Liverpool, thinking he had reached New York while trying to run away from the Cossacks, chose a name he thought sounded German in order to hide his Jewish identity. He didn’t seem to know that second to Cohen the most used Jewish surname is Epstein. His choice to change his name has carried on from generation to generation. You and I are the products of countless, one would say, good choices (as you are alive and, please God, well, while reading thus far!).

I’m not going to tell you anything about the Jewish communities in Copenhagen and Johannesburg that you can easily Google yourself. For the sake of brevity, I would like to share with you my impressions though. Yet, if you get a chance definitely Google King Christian IV (1577–1648) – a womaniser and friend to the Jews. He had ambitions to be the emperor of Europe, held lavish parties that lasted for weeks, had many mistresses, 24 children by 5 women and 2 wives (you read that right). If anyone is worth Googling it’s King Christian!

What left an impression on me were the boundaries the communities created for themselves. Here is where the challenge lies: how open and how closed should our communities be? I came across what I’ll call the “bowl analogy” in Together by Vivek Murthy. The visual of wide and shallow bowls versus tall and narrow ones has stayed with me, and it has helped me understand the challenges our Jewish communities face: how open should we be, how closed, and what shape will allow us to pass on our legacy while still welcoming people in?

An extremely open society is akin to a wide and shallow bowl. The bowl is so wide that anyone can get in and out of it; there’s so much space between people that they can’t look after each other, not for the good and not for the bad. Traditions of the past don’t have any depth because the bowl is so shallow. On the other side is the tall and narrow bowl. It is so narrow that there is no room for anyone to slip in or out without a tremendous amount of difficulty, and yet tradition is strong because each generation stands on the shoulders of those before them. The language and customs pass directly up; there is no room in this society for much deviation because the bowl is too narrow.

To me, Copenhagen, with its 85–90% intermarriage where over 50% of the remaining community are converts, may seem like a wide and shallow bowl. And Johannesburg, where over 50–60% of the community are observant Orthodox Jews, may feel like that tall and narrow bowl. What I saw was, in fact, two communities trying their hardest to change the shape of their bowl. Both are seeking to change shape through education, understanding that our children are skipping out of the bowls and selecting no bowl at all, not seeing a place for themselves in the shallow and wide and not in the tall and narrow.

And unless we create a space for them with firm boundaries, filled with love for them, love for Judaism and education, our children will leave the table completely. I am forever grateful that I get to explore our incredible and varied Jewish world, to learn from my colleagues, and that in my small way I get to be one of those voices trying to change the shape of the Jewish bowl — for the year ahead may we create spaces for ourselves and our children that are just the right depth and just the right height to allow them to feel loved and embraced without feeling suffocated.