First and second nights – a delicate juggling act

For many married couples, planning Rosh Hashanah comes with a question trickier than deciding who’s hosting or what to serve: whose family gets us for yomtov? 

Two nights may sound like plenty of time, until they have to be divided between parents, in-laws, and, sometimes, different cities. Add religious observance, family expectations, and the inevitable question of whose “turn” it is, and Rosh Hashanah dinners can involve a lot of diplomacy. 

Not wanting to start or cause more family faribels, we have changed the names of the people we spoke to. 

For Rachel and her husband, Josh, the problem is simple. “There are two nights and four families. Somebody is going to be unhappy. 

“We both have different family households that want us, so between the two of us there are four places we could be for dinner. And obviously everyone wants a night. The problem is that there are only two. 

“You start with, ‘Okay, who did we go to last year?’ Then someone remembers Pesach. Then you start discussing lunches because maybe we can fit somebody in there. Does lunch count the same as dinner? Does first night somehow count more than second night? I swear, you need an Excel spreadsheet!” 

The seemingly simple solution of bringing everybody together doesn’t work for everyone either. 

“People always say, ‘Why don’t you just have everyone together?’ Well, because they aren’t all friends,” Rachel says. “They don’t hate each other or anything dramatic, but that doesn’t mean everybody wants to spend yomtov together. You can’t force four separate families to suddenly become one happy family because you got married. 

“You know when someone is disappointed. They don’t even have to say it. You get the, ‘Oh, okay, enjoy’ and you know exactly what that means. And then you feel terrible because the last thing you want is for somebody to think you don’t want to be with them,” she says. 

For Ben, the problem isn’t the number of families, it’s the distance between them. “My family is in Cape Town, where we live, and my wife’s family is in Joburg. So we don’t have the option that some couples have of saying, ‘We’ll do your parents first night and mine second night.’ If we fly to Joburg, that’s where we are. If we stay in Cape Town, her parents don’t have us for Rosh Hashanah. 

“We thought we could do one year Joburg, one year Cape Town. Very fair. Except family life doesn’t work out that way. Maybe we were with one family for Pesach, maybe there’s a reason we can’t travel that year, maybe siblings are coming in from somewhere else. Suddenly everybody remembers exactly where you were for every yomtov.” 

The guilt, he says, is real. “I think the thing we both worry about is our parents feeling like we’re choosing the other family. That’s never what we’re doing. Sometimes we’re literally choosing whether we’re buying plane tickets.” 

For Leah, even having both families in Johannesburg doesn’t mean the two nights can simply be divided between them. “My husband’s family lives close enough for us to walk there. Mine doesn’t. We don’t drive on yomtov, so that changes everything. If we’re going to my family, we’re not just going for supper. We need to get there before yomtov, we’re sleeping there, we’re packing clothes, we’re thinking about where we’re going to shul the next morning. You can’t suddenly decide at 22:00, ‘Actually, let’s go sleep at my parents tonight.’ 

“I sometimes worry that from the outside it looks like we’re always choosing his family. We’re not. They’re just within walking distance. My parents understand that, but obviously they still want us there. Understanding why your children can’t come doesn’t mean you don’t miss them.” 

Eventually, Leah has had to stop trying to make everything perfectly equal. “If you start counting, you’ll make yourself crazy. Maybe his family gets more of Rosh Hashanah and mine gets more of another yomtov. You have to look at family life as a whole because sometimes you physically can’t make every festival 50-50.” 

And then there is Maya, who listens to friends discussing these negotiations with some amusement. “I honestly didn’t realise how lucky we were until I got married and started hearing other couples talk about whose turn it was. We don’t really have ‘your family, my family’ for yomtov. Someone hosts and everyone comes. Maybe my parents host one meal and his parents do another, but we’re all still sitting together. 

“Sometimes my mother phones and asks what my mother-in-law is doing before she asks what we’re doing,” Maya laughs. “I’m like, ‘Hello, remember me? I’m the reason you two know each other.’ Nobody is keeping score. There isn’t a first night that belongs to one family and a second night that belongs to the other. I know that’s unusual, and we’re incredibly lucky.” 

So couples approach the same two nights with completely different calculations. For some, the complication is distance; for others, religious observance or family structures. And for a lucky few, there is no calculation at all. 

But perhaps Rachel, with her four-family juggling act, has found the best way of looking at it. “We eventually realised that we’re never going to make four families equally happy with two nights. That’s impossible. But then you think about why they’re upset. It’s because they want you there. There are worse problems to have than too many people wanting you around their Rosh Hashanah table.”