Before I start on Yom Kippur I want to explain a little about the blog this month. I kind of liked the idea to use September as a start date so I could start when the kids went back to school. Now that I've researched all the holidays for September I see it wasn't an ideal month to start a craft and food site for the holidays. There is a lot of fasting and focus on the non-material. While still fascinating to learn things we didn't know, this weeks holidays in particular did not lend themselves to much baking or crafting. But never fear there is lots of baking and crafting coming next week! Just no food this week. How can I cook to celebrate a holiday with a main component being fasting? Any ideas of what you do if you observe Yom Kippur would be greatly appreciated! Ok, so onto the holiday.....

Yom Kippur comes ten days after Rosh Hashanah. The name "Yom Kippur" means "Day of Atonement". This is a day of asking God forgiveness of your sins. Yom Kippur is a more solemn day then Rosh Hashanah and is a day of continued reflection. According to Jewish tradition at Yom Kippur's end God seals the Book of Life and the Book of Death for the coming year. This means that God has decided who lives and dies during the next year. This is a day of introspection and is also a time of fasting (both food and water for 25 hours) and abstaining from other bodily activities. Many people wear white on Yom Kippur to symbolize a pure and clean way that people intend to start the new year. Often times people do not wear leather shoes on Yom Kippur as a symbol of denying certain luxuries, because back in the time when the Torah was written, leather shoes were one of the only comfortable shoe options. People would often go barefoot but today people will defer to sneakers or other footwear if they chose to avoid leather shoes.

As I stated in the Rosh Hashanah post, sin is a difficult idea for young children to grasp. So I again talked about it being a time to think about not doing things that are naughty or hurtful or mean and thinking about a way to do better. I decided not to talk about the book of life with our boys since this past year we had two deaths in the family and I wasn't ready to go over that subject with them again at this point. I do think if your kids are old or mature enough that it is an important part of Yom Kippur and should be discussed. Next year I plan on going over the book of life aspect with my guys.

There is no food project for Yom Kippur since it is a time of fasting. For our craft project we made cardboard slippers that could be an alternative to leather footwear. We were inspired by the craft found here.

Materials:

Cardboard (We used frozen pizza boxes)

tape

crayons and washi tape for decorating.

Method:

I had the boys trace about a half inch away from their feet so their "slippers" would fit their feet. They took turns tracing each other's feet. Then I drew two "rainbow" shapes to cut to use as the tops.

Outlines for top and bottom of the slippers

After cutting out the shapes we fit the slippers and taped the tops in place. I started with scotch tape but switched to duct because it need to hold together for when they were worn.

Taped bottom- notice the reused pizza box

Then I let the boys decorate. My Middle did his quick and they turned out cute and sloppy. We had to use duct tape after the first wear because the regular scotch couldn't handle the running around. My older son took his time and found some yarn from our Mabon craft (coming soon) to wrap around his slippers so they would be softer.

Thanks for reading. If you have crafts you do or your family did for Yom Kippur I would love to hear more feel free to message me or leave a comment.

For knowledge of Yom Kippur I mainly used the sites chabad.org and reformjudaism.org.

Craft Theology