September is the month of new beginnings. Back to work, back to school. Starting over. In Judaism, September brings The Jewish New Year, and this is the year 5773.
Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, the anniversary of creation, is the beginning of the Days of Awe, days of reflection; days that provoke anxiety, a sense of trepidation and humility, soul-searching, and days of judgement and pardon. It is a time to rethink our place in the family, community, the universe. It is an opportunity for Teshuva, to return, to repent, to begin again.
We seek forgiveness from others and then of ourselves, and only then from God. We reflect on the past. We remember. We are our memories. We define ourselves by our memories, our stories. But we have been blessed with a great gift that enables us to rethink our memories, redefine them so that we can remove anger, hurt, and disappointment and replace those memories with an acceptance of our imperfections and the ability to accept the imperfections of others so that we can begin again renewed with hope.
Much of this is cerebral. We are rethinking choices made in the past, how we would respond to the same choices in the future. It is a call to an ethical rebirth as well as a spiritual one. But it is also a time of an abundance of rituals and symbols that enable us to concretize the ephemeral and experience the illimitable God through all our senses.
We internalize the meaning of the holiday with a variety of foods. It is a time to “eat the book.” Food for thought and thought for food. A round challah, or egg bread, that symbolizes the cycle awaits at the head of the table. And we dip pieces of bread, as well as apples from the fall harvest, into honey in the hope of a sweet year. It reminds me of children entering school for the first time and the ritual of eating bread shaped in the letters of the alphabet that has been dipped into honey to internalize the sweetness of learning. I recently read of food customs of Sephardic Jews (Jews with Spanish and Portuguese ancestry) that were new to me: eating a bowl of pomegranates sprinkled with orange-flower water so that our virtues will be as numerous as the pomegranate seeds; and the one I like best is eating a dish with one fish: like the fish, may we always have our eyes open, be on the look-out and flourish in great number.
And Rosh Hashana is the time to cast our sins into the depths of the sea. Off to a lake, a river, an ocean, together in community. We cast bread upon the water. As we watch the bread flow away from us we cast away, we let go of our hurt, pain, anger and sorrow so that we are no longer held hostage by negative emotions that have a habit of discolouring all that is before us.
And in the synagogue we listen to the blowing of the Shofar, a ram’s horn that reminds us of the story of the Akeda, the binding of Isaac and the ram that was sacrificed in his stead. It is the sounding of the Shofar that transports us back to Mount Sinai at the moment when the ‘trumpet blast grew louder and louder” and God revealed Himself to us through His words. It is the sound of the Shofar, the wailing, piercing, mournful sound of the Shofar that calls to us, that awakens us to the holiness of the coming days, a time of awe, a call to repentance. I’m not sure if the call is coming from God to us exhorting us to transform, or is it rather a call from deep within our souls to God to once again shine a light on the path and embrace us with His love. There are different sounds of the Shofar; short quivering notes and the long and mournful. The short quivering notes represent God’s justice while the long mournful ones symbolize mercy. The notes of mercy bracket the sounds of justice to remind us that God’s justice is always surrounded and tempered by mercy. The call of the Shofar is a call to us to remember to be just and merciful and walk humbly in God’s ways.
It is the beginning of a new year; school and work. It is a time to reset priorities. It is a time to refocus energy. It is a time for ethical and spiritual renewal and a time to remember what is most important, most precious in our lives.
