Rosh Hashanah is not about 'you'

Some of our festivals are easier to understand than others. The Exodus story at the Pesach Seder, the Ten Commandments on Shavuot, Esther’s heroics retold on Purim, and the defeat of the invading Greeks recalled on Chanukah, are all easy to relate to and quickly capture our interest.

Not so Rosh Hashanah. Hours in synagogue, reams of text to plough through and a sombre atmosphere are a less attractive proposition. True, the powerful blasts of the shofar can awaken a deep feeling in us, but what is this feeling? The primal sound of the shofar stirs us, but it contains no distinct message. What is Rosh Hashanah all about?

We tend to lump together Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur as a time for personal reflection, spiritually and holiness. We call them the “High Holy Days”, or Yamim Noraim, in Hebrew. This is translated as “Days of Awe”, not “Daze of Ahhh!” as college student wrote after mishearing Professor Deborah Lipstadt on a Judaism 101 course. “Although”, as she told me later, “maybe that would be a more accurate account of what most of us are experiencing in shul!”

I think what gets us dazed and confused is not appreciating the profound difference between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Aside from hearing the shofar on one and fasting on the other, much of what we do on these days is the same: the shul is adorned in white, we dress immaculately, pray an awful lot, stand silently, kneel occasionally, and think about our mistakes and how we can improve.

This is all true, but it misses a vital distinction. Yom Kippur is focused on our sinful actions, while Rosh Hashanah makes no mention of them at all. On Yom Kippur we beat our hearts for each sin we have committed, confess our failings one by one, and repeatedly pray for forgiveness. On Rosh Hashanah we do none of these; in fact we hardly refer to our personal lives and actions at all.

Look through the machzor of Rosh Hashanah and you will find expressions of our desire to be close to God and for God to judge us favourably, but there is no accounting of our sins. In fact, the word sin, chet, hardly appears.

One notable exception is the first line of the Avinu Malkeinu prayer which reads, “Our Father, our King, we have sinned before You”. But one medieval sage, the Arizal, even endorsed missing out this line in order to reiterate that the focus is not on our personal transgressions.

This is all because Rosh Hashanah is not about you.

Judaism is not a religion for comfort.

The philosophy of individualism has been so widely accepted today, that to imagine any other viewpoint is nigh impossible. The values of independence and self-reliance, and that our personal needs take precedence over other people, society and the state, are so woven into the fabric of our being that to challenge them seems ignorant or ridiculous.

But it is not all about us. Of course, our feelings and our hopes our successes and mistakes matter, but they are not be-all and end-all. I am convinced that Rosh Hashanah is meant to address this pervasive misconception.

Rosh Hashanah is about God’s vision for the world. It presents us with the purpose of Creation, but does not commemorate Creation itself. For on Rosh Hashanah the universe was conceived by God, not created. Three times in the repetition of the Mussaf Amidah, after each set of ten shofar blasts, we sing Hayom Harat Olam, “This day the world was conceived”.

The creation of a human child begins with conception and is followed hopefully by birth, thirty-eight weeks later. The talmudic rabbis saw this as a model for the creation of the universe. It was conceived by God and then, after a defined period, brought into being. This, in fact, is the essence of the debate in tractate Rosh Hashanah about when the world was created. Rabbi Eliezer said it was in the month of Tishri, but Rabbi Joshua said it was six months later in Nisan. Over several dense pages, both sides bring numerous biblical verses to advocate for their positions.

The resolution to this debate, given by the Tosafot commentary, is that God conceived of creating the world in Tishri but only actually did it in Nisan. This might sound outlandish and reminiscent of the 17th-century Archbishop James Ussher, who tried to pin down the exact date and time of Creation, concluding that it was 6pm, October 23, 4004 BCE. Ussher’s chronology, which is amusing to us in its precision, was based on his absolute literalist approach to scripture.

Our tradition however, through the genres of agadah (Jewish lore) and midrash (allegorical exegesis), does not aim to determine the astronomical dating of the universe, which we now know emerged gradually, after an initial surge, over billions of years. Rather, the debate in the Talmud is about the philosophical nature of existence.

God had a plan for creation before it was created. There is a vision to this universe. It did not just happen randomly, with no purpose or forethought. Time and again the prayers of Rosh Hashanah describe God’s dominion over the Universe. We repeatedly call God Hamelech, the Sovereign. God is the visionary creator of all life and thus the judge of our worthiness.

On these two days the machzor asks us to reacquaint ourselves with God’s vision, “Let all that were made revere You, and all creatures bow before You, let them all be bound together as one to carry out Your will”. Only once we seriously engage with this can we then reflect on our own actions and realise the gap between what we are and what we could be. That is what brings us to repent on Yom Kippur. But first, Rosh Hashanah is meant to recalibrate us.

Judaism is not a religion for comfort. It is a profound perspective on the call to humankind to step up to its role in the ongoing development of the universe. To seek out purpose and uncover meaning. We are not a lonely planet in the dark expanse of space that just popped into existence through random quantum fluctuations, we are part of an immensely complicated and intricate web of life that expresses the vision of our Creator.

I find it hard to express this notion in words, it lies at the edge of my comprehension. Maybe that is the point of the shofar. It too is beyond words. The sound reverberates in our bones and pierces our souls. It overcomes our individualistic particularity and touches on primal being. It brings us back to the moment when God conceived of the universe.

In an attempt to imagine this, I think of myself sitting beside God looking over the blueprints for existence. God turns to me and says, “Do you see? Do you understand how it all fits together? Do you want to be a part of this great project?” And so, I do look and try my best to comprehend, and I answer, “Yes, count me in.” That, to my mind, is what Rosh Hashanah is about.