The other day, my daughter Jenny was looking at a photograph framed and mounted on a wall in my house. “Of all the art you have here, Mom, this is my favorite,” she said. That surprised me. Although I, too, am drawn to the photo, it seems such a trifle when compared to some of the larger pieces placed elsewhere. I purchased the photograph about 15 years ago, having seen the image published in The New York Times. I called the paper and was connected to the photographer, David Gonzalez, who sold me a 7×10 b/w image of “Mott Haven Dancers.” I floated the picture in a simple 16×20 frame, which presents the piece spaciously. But why is it her favorite? So small. So seemingly dismissible.

People often are asked about favorites. “What’s your favorite song?” “Who’s your favorite writer?” We ask artists to name a favorite painting, memoirists a favorite experience. Some years ago, James Lipton hosted a television show titled “Inside the Actors Studio” — interviews with Broadway’s A-list, always ending with the question: “What’s your favorite word?” Most of them were bleeped, but my favorite response to the favorite-word question came from Paul Newman, who answered, “Lunch.”

So here we are on the cusp of Rosh Hashanah — Tishrei 5784 — and the remaining observances that comprise what we call the High Holidays or High Holy Days. And so I ask readers, “What’s your favorite High Holiday service?” If my hunch is correct, you never saw that coming…

In fact, I have a favorite High Holiday service — a gut response like my daughter’s to a certain photo — and I think about it every year at this time. Indeed, many of the High Holiday services are beautiful and meaningful — the blowing of the shofar a startling reminder of ancient times, the cantor’s chanting of the Kol Nidre prayer a stirring moment. But my favorite — the absolute, unlimited, unconditional, pure moment for me is Ne’ilah. Yes, of course, you say, the last service on the long slog through Yom Kippur with a break-the-fast meal at hand. Plausible explanations to be sure. But not mine.

The Ne’ilah service returns me emotionally to a time long, long ago — to a young Sara, clothed in a party dress and shiny black patent-leather Mary Jane shoes, accompanying her father to the Ne’ilah service at our family’s shul. Year after year, I would look forward to this ritual, from childhood party shoes until I left home for college in a trench coat and penny loafers with no socks. Just the two of us, I and my father, holding hands, mounting the stairs to the sanctuary located on the second floor of Temple B’Nai Israel in the small New Jersey town where I grew up. Unlike the earlier services, when I sat with my mother on the women’s side, this time I sat next to my father, the only girl in a sea of men, to complete the final Yom Kippur ritual. At the time, I didn’t know what the Ne’ilah service was about. What I knew then was that this was a special time set aside for my father and me.

I’ve heard Rabbi Gadi use the expression “shul-ed out” when observances fall one after the other in close progression. I guess that was the case for my mother and brother. But not for me. Not a chance that at my father’s invitation to join him for Ne’ilah would I refuse. There were other times that my father took his daughter when mostly males were invited — a lunch at the Kiwanis Club with all the businessmen, and my father and me; a busload of fans off to Shibe Park in Philadelphia to watch an A’s game, all the fathers and sons, and my father and me.

I hope all of you will come to this year’s Ne’ilah service at our shul. Yes, it’s one more service in a long string of them. It means spiffing up once again, getting to the shul yet another time. It also signifies completion, the close of another Yom Kippur ritual and, spiritually, the close of the Book of Life. I will be there, sadly not with my father at my side. But he will be in my thoughts and in my heart.

—Sara Bloom