Child Still Sore At Synagogue Candy Man For Shirking Duties On Yom Kippur

“We should have thrown him in the river instead of the bread!”

Mount Vernon, October 13 – A nine-year-old remains resentful today, a full day after the Day of Atonement, that the shul member who has otherwise taken it upon himself to distribute sweets to young attendees during Sabbath and Holiday services either neglected or refused to bring his supply yesterday, when Jewish practice calls for fasting from sundown the evening before to nightfall the following evening.

Jackie Hirsch sulked about the house Sunday morning and well into the afternoon, family witnesses reported, giving her feelings toward Fleetwood Synagogue’s unofficial candy-man, seventy-year-old Irwin Reich, full expression.

“I hate him,” she stated at least six times throughout the day, with paraphrases of the sentiment occurring six or seven other times.

“He can go jump in the Bronx River!” she shouted as she refused to eat breakfast this morning. “We should have thrown him in the river instead of the bread!” With that outburst, Jackie referred to the Jewish penitential ritual Tashlikh, usually performed on Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year, which this year coincided with October 2nd and 3rd. Tashlikh centers around a passage from the book of Micah that urges God to cast His people’s sins “into the depths of the sea.” For centuries, Jews have tried to perform the ritual on the first day of Rosh HaShanah that does not coincide with the Sabbath. Some even take bread, crackers, or other food to throw into the water to represent the sins they wish to shed, though many authorities on Jewish law caution against that practice both because it wastes food and because it often becomes more about feeding the eager ducks and geese in and around the water than about aspiring to be rid of one’s sins.

“Sweetie, on Yom Kippur, adults don’t e-” her mother Miriam began, only to provoke a bellowed “I DON’T CARE!” from Jackie. “His job is to bring candy to shul! What reason do I have to bother going if he’s not going to give me a lollipop?”

Miriam and Jackie’s father, Alan, had made sure to provision their daughter with sandwiches, carrot sticks, juice boxes, and enough snacks to satisfy a medium-size horse; those provisions proved inadequate to the task of compensating for Mr. Reich’s candies. Jackie’s time in the synagogue yesterday fell into two distinct chapters: the ten minutes before she discovered that the candy-man had brought no candy for Yom Kippur, and the hour-and-forty-five-minutes following the catastrophic disclosure. Miriam volunteered to take the girl home to avoid her tantrums causing further disruption to the nearly-all-day liturgy.

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