September 12, 2007
1 Tishrei 5768
Calendars Collide?
I would be lost without my calendar. I happen to keep mine on my palm pilot, and if it were to break or get erased, the effect would be devastating. My calendar orders my life. When the hours in my days are unformed and void, my calendar – like the word of God at Creation! – fashions my world out of that chaos.
Perhaps it is a touch ironic, then, that calendars are, for many American Jews, a source of confusion. Why don’t the Jewish holidays match up with the same American calendar days every year? And why do the holidays start and end at sundown? And how many new years do we celebrate? And are we in the 21st century, or the 58th?
I remember encountering similar confusion among many of my classmates in the Episcopalian school I attended as a child. “Why did I get to miss school a few days every fall?” (Maybe they were a little jealous!) I would explain that it was the Jewish High Holidays; not knowing a whole lot more than that, I would sometimes tentatively add, “It’s a long story.”
* * *
Now I know a little bit more than I did then, and so I can say with confidence, “It’s a long story.” Because the history of the development of the Jewish New Year is a rather long and complicated story.
The Bible does not actually mention the phrase “Rosh Hashanah.” In fact, the Torah’s designation of the New Year is not Rosh Hashanah at all but something entirely different. As we read in Exodus 12:1-2, about the springtime month of Nisan, “Adonai said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt: This month shall mark for you the beginning of the months; it shall be the first of the months of the year for you.” This New Year is situated in the Exodus story, as a commemoration of the first Passover, when the Israelites were redeemed from Egyptian bondage. In other words, the rebirth of the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as a nation occurred in the month of Nisan, in the spring, the season of rebirth. Thus, the New Year as defined in Exodus, as one scholar put it, “coincided with the beginning of Jewish national history.”
So the months of the year begin at Passover, and Jewish national history begins at Passover, and that makes sense as the New Year holiday. But what does the Bible say about Rosh Hashanah?
Well, like I said, the phrase itself does not appear in the Bible, but there is a reference in both Leviticus 23.24-25 and Numbers 29.1-2 to a day of sacred assembly, when we are to make offerings to God, observe complete rest, and sound the shofar. And this is to be done on the first day of the seventh month, Tishrei – that is, today.
So we have something that looks like what we’re doing today, with the sacred assembly and the shofar, but it doesn’t say anything about a new year. So where does this Rosh Hashanah idea come from?
Enter the Rabbis. The Mishnah, the 2nd-century compilation of rabbinic teachings and commentary on the Torah, holds the key to answering our questions. Here the Rabbis actually name four different New Years, including Passover/Nisan, but only one of the other three interests us today. That one, which they actually call “Rosh Hashanah,” they designate as the first day of the seventh month – today. More specifically, they define it as the beginning of the year for counting years, sabbatical years (7-yr cycle), and jubilees (50-yr cycle).
In effect, the Rabbis built a practical, functional New Year observance on the foundation of a biblical day of assembly. In this respect, it resembles the American New Year, when the calendar year resets. Rosh Hashanah would be, the Rabbis decided, the focal point for organizing the calendar. There’s that order-from-chaos thing again.
* * *
The New Year celebrated on Passover is symbolic and particularistic. It is about our genesis as the Jewish People, and our story about leaving Egypt, wandering in the wilderness, and receiving our Torah.
But for the Rabbis, and I would say for most Jews, this has never been the end of the story. The genius of Judaism is in the profound link between particularism and a commitment to universal values and responsibility.
Sure enough, the calendar reflects this. Six months after our national celebration of the Passover story, we experience Rosh Hashanah. This New Year is, literally, universal – a commemoration of God’s creation of the universe, the world, and all humanity. This holiday asks us not, “Where do you stand as a Jew?” but rather, “Where do you stand as a human being?”
I think the Rabbis meant for it to be so. Elsewhere in the Mishnah, they describe Rosh Hashanah this way, quoting from Psalm 33:
On Rosh Hashanah all human beings pass before God as troops, as it is said, “Adonai looks down from heaven, God sees all mankind. From God’s dwelling place God gazes on all the inhabitants of the earth, God who fashions the hearts of them all, who discerns all their doings” (Psalm 33:13‑15). (M. Rosh Hashanah 1.2)For the rabbis, the Universal New Year, Rosh Hashanah, was elevated above the Jewish People’s New Year, Passover. Where the latter celebrates particularistic national myth, the former recognizes universal human responsibility. With our years punctuated perennially at six-month intervals by these two alternating New Year observances, it feels as if that particularistic redemption from Egyptian bondage gave us the freedom and privilege to realize our common humanity.
Living between those New Years is still a challenge, though. Judaism, and especially Reform Judaism, does not bemoan our acculturation into American society; we embrace it. Sometimes this relationship creates tension, between seeing ourselves as Jews and seeing ourselves as Americans, and more globally as human beings.
But we continue to live with a foot in each world. The chaos of our lives is ordered by two overlaid but not always overlapping calendars.
My prayer for all of us in this season is that we find the insight and support to turn that tension into inspiration and action. May we learn from the wisdom of our calendars to navigate between particularism and universalism, between self and other, and so take responsibility in the world as Jews, and as human beings.
Shanah tovah.
*Special thanks to my teacher Rabbi Larry Hoffman for planting the seed of the idea for this sermon in our Liturgy class on September 6, 2007.
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