On the afternoon of the first day of Rosh Hashanah, Jews walk to the nearest body of water, say a short passage out loud, shake out the hems of their pockets, and walk back. The whole thing takes about ten minutes and is one of the more quietly affecting customs of the year.

What you say

The text comes from the closing lines of the prophet Micah, and the custom takes its name from one of its verbs — v’tashlich, “and You will cast”:

מִי־אֵל כָּמוֹךָ נֹשֵׂא עָוֹן וְעֹבֵר עַל־פֶּשַׁע … וְתַשְׁלִיךְ בִּמְצֻלוֹת יָם כָּל־חַטֹּאותָם

Who is a G-d like You, who pardons iniquity and overlooks transgression … and You will cast all their sins into the depths of the sea.

Most machzorim print the full passage with a few added psalms; the prayer books at shul have it, and we say it together. Afterward it is customary to shake out the corners and pockets of your clothing — a small, deliberately physical gesture of emptying.

Why water, and why water with fish in it

The preference is for a body of water that has fish, and the reasons given are worth hearing because they are not what you’d guess.

A fish never closes its eyes — it has none to close. The tradition hears that as a picture of an attention that never lapses: nothing about the last year went unnoticed, and nothing about the coming one will.

Fish are also caught suddenly, in nets they never see coming. Standing at the water on the Day of Judgment, watching creatures who have no idea what is about to happen to them, is a fairly direct way of thinking about how much of your own year you are actually in charge of.

And fish multiply abundantly — so the visit doubles as a request for blessing.

What it is not

It is worth saying plainly: the water does not take your sins. There is no transfer. You do not arrive carrying something and leave lighter because of the location.

The halachic and Chassidic sources are insistent on this, because the custom is old enough and vivid enough to be misread. What produces forgiveness on these days is teshuvah — an honest look at what you did, regret that is actually felt, and a decision about what happens next. Tashlich adds no shortcut around that.

What it adds is a body. Judaism has a persistent instinct that ideas need something physical to hold onto, or they stay pleasant and go nowhere. Standing at the edge of moving water, saying out loud that G-d overlooks transgression, and turning your pockets inside out is a way of getting an abstraction into your hands for a moment. That is the whole mechanism, and it is not a small one.

When

The afternoon of the first day, after the meal. When the first day of Rosh Hashanah falls on Shabbat, tashlich moves to the second day — because there is no carrying the machzor to the water on Shabbat.

If you miss it entirely, it can be said any time through the end of Yom Kippur, and in some communities as late as Hoshanah Rabbah.

Coming with us

We go together from the shul in the afternoon, straight from the kiddush luncheon — it’s an easy walk, it’s over quickly, and the children like it best of anything all day. If you’d rather do it on your own, any water will do: the Intracoastal, a canal, the Gulf, a retention pond behind your house.

The second day’s short late-afternoon service, before sundown, also includes tashlich — for anyone whose day only works later.