Rosh Hashanah

"The Enigma of Rosh Hashanah"
by Neil Gillman

The designation of a festival called Rosh Hashanah is nowhere to be found in the Bible. In Leviticus 23:23-26 and Numbers 29:l-6, we are commanded to celebrate an unnamed festival on the first day of the seventh month, later called Tishri, but scant details are offered. (In biblical chronology, the first month of the year is the spring month of Nisan, when we celebrate Passover.) We are to refrain from work, observe the day as a sacred occasion and bring certain sacrifices. But all of these we do on all the other festivals. The only distinctive biblical theme for this day involves the sounding of the shofar. In Leviticus 23:24, we are commanded to celebrate with 'loud blasts' and in Numbers 29:l, we are given a description of the festival as "a day when the horn is sounded." But these references to the sounding of the shofar are accompanied by not a single word of explanation.

The name "Rosh Hashanah" appears first in the Mishnah (Rosh Hashanah l:l) where we are told that there are four "Rosh Hashanah" or "new year" days. One of these, the first of the month of Tishri, was designated for calculating the years of foreign kings and the sabbatical and Jubilee years, and for planting trees and vegetables. We are also told (Rosh Hashanah 1:2) that on this day, "...all who come into the world pass before God like legions of soldiers." The Mishnah understands this metaphor to denote that on this day, all human beings pass before God in judgment.

Despite these enigmatic beginnings, today on Rosh Hashanah, even those Jews who are very far from active involvement with Jewish religious life all year long, flock to synagogues and quite obviously feel differently about themselves as Jews. Why?

There are two explanations for this evolution, one stemming from our tradition and the other from the modern study of religion.

The Mishnah's reference to Rosh Hashanah as a day on which all people come before God "like legions of soldiers" arises from the imperial reach of Yom Kippur, celebrated just ten days after Rosh Hashanah. Yom Kippur is the day on which we make expiation for our sins (Leviticus 23:28), and it was so powerful and distinctive that it imbued Rosh Hashanah with the theme of judgment. Over time, rabbinic tradition extended Yom Kippur's reach even farther back, to the first day of the twelfth month, Elul. On that day, six weeks prior to Yom Kippur, we start sounding the shofar at the morning service and begin our annual process of self-evaluation and self-renewal.

Another piece of Rosh Hashanah's evolution occurred when Tishri displaced Nisan as the liturgical first month. A fascinating debate is recorded in the Babylonian Talmud on, of all things, precisely when the world was created. Rabbi Joshua claims that the world was created on the first of Nisan; Rabbi Eliezer counters that it was on the first of Tishri. The rabbinic consensus accepted Rabbi Eliezer's position. In testimony to their choice, to this day, after each of the three soundings of the shofar in our Rosh Hashanah musaf service, we recite a brief prayer beginning with the words, "Today the world came into being..." These words are followed immediately by the words, "Today all human beings are judged..." Note the juxtaposition. Now, a sense of universal renewal expands and strengthens the personal judgment theme extended from Yom Kippur; the rabbinic tradition reinforces the theme of personal renewal with the notion that the whole world begins again each Rosh Hashanah.

However elusive the biblical message about Rosh Hashanah may be, the festival has evolved through our tradition to represent a season of personal and universal renewal. Every human being needs an opportunity to begin again, to wipe out the past and dream dreams about what his or her life can become. This is one of the reasons our festival exercises such power.

The modern scholarly inquiry into the nature of religion adds another dimension to this theme. One understanding of religion suggests that its function is to order our human experience, to wrest a sense of cosmos from the chaos that hovers over our lives.

This sense of cosmos is most threatened at the thresholds of our life experiences, during those moments when two different orders or structures interface and blur. To stand on a threshold is to be in between, neither here nor there, and invariably to feel a certain tension. That is why many religious rituals are located precisely at threshold moments. In Judaism, we ritualize dawn and dusk through worship, the end and the beginning of the week through ceremonies marking the onset and conclusion of Shabbat, and life cycle events (birth, puberty, marriage and death) each through a particular celebration or rite. We also mark private and public spaces through the mezuzah we affix to the doorposts of our homes.

In all of these cases, the purpose of the ritual is to bring the threshold into our awareness, to remind us that we are leaving one structure and entering another. As a student once put it, a ritual is a way of saying goodbye and saying hello. It helps us order our life experience. Think how chaotic our lives would be if, for example, we did not have ways of distinguishing between hours, days, weeks, months and years. Rituals help us make these distinctions and Jewish rituals inform them with specifically Jewish meanings.

Now think of Rosh Hashanah as one more mezuzah, this one in time. One of the traditional blessings we offer each other on this day is, "May the year and its curses end, may the year and its blessings begin." This blessing captures well the threshold nature of the day. As the Sabbath does to weeks, so this festival does to years; both counter the blurring of time. We say goodbye to the old time and hello to the new. In the process we say goodbye to our old selves and hello to our new ones. That's the distinctive message of Rosh Hashanah.