When it is New Year’s Eve in Denmark you may find plates smashed on your doorstep – it’s meant to bring you luck. On New Years Day in Brazil you may be fed lentils to symbolise wealth – as many coins as the number of lentils. In Romania children will be dressed as bears to frighten away evil spirits. When the Chinese New Year of the Snake begins in January there will be lots of red envelopes, rice dumplings and indoor kumquat trees for luck and wealth. And the London Eye on the turn of the New Year will burst with fireworks while champagne corks are popped.
What do Jews do for New Year, for our Rosh Hashanah? Rabbi Dalia Marx (From Time to Time p7) teacher extraordinaire at our Reform Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, explains what we all know – we are invited ‘into a month of preparation, reflection and introspection by taking stock of our lives. It is a month of examining what we have done right and what we need to correct, especially in our relations with others.’ There are special moments on the way – the rousing call of the Shofar to wake us up to our task, the Taschlich ceremony to ‘help us define what we want to get rid of in our behaviour’, the Yom Kippur Viddui prayers (the sin we have committed against You) to help us all together to conduct a self assessment and then ending up the month a week of throwing off home comforts and living in the elements in a Sukkah.
Compared to all these other cultures it doesn’t sound like much fun. But I don’t agree – the rituals of so many cultures around New Year are external – about luck, good fortune, averting evil eyes through loud noise – all things which say we are not in control, as if being human is about being blown about by the winds of chance. Judaism says no. We are responsible for so much in our lives. We can’t do much about what life throws at us but we can absolutely make choices about what we do in reaction. We can choose life – as we will hear on Yom Kippur ‘u’vacharta b’chaim’ (Deuteronomy 30:19). We can choose forgiveness – to forgive others who might have hurt us. We can choose faithfulness to our values as Abraham did in our Torah portion today. We can choose positive action.
The Jewish New Year is a rite of passage. The anthropologist Victor Turner (1920-1983) identified a rite of passage as a time of separation from the past, transition by a ritual, then integration into a future style of life.
Bar of Bat Mitzvah is a rite of passage – separating you from the community of children, transition as you learn your Torah portion and what it means to become a Jewish adult and step up to the Bimah. Then integration into the adult community with the privilege of all of the Mitzvot at your lifelong disposal.
So is this time every year a rite of passage for all of us. We separate from the past year. We transition through a month of festivals and fasts which remove us from the ‘continuous flow of daily life’, often literally as we are among few people in our work or learning place to be absent on the Jewish festivals. We integrate into the new year as a more grown and developed person following the process of this sacred month.
This year this time of transition is also going to include the Yahrzheit of October 7th, and in future years, since the Hamas murders took place on Simchat Torah, it will at least in our lifetimes, be a part of the Tishri journey.
Our memorial gatherings as a community at the Hyde Park event on Sunday afternoon and at EHRS on Sunday evening will ask us to choose life by remembering and valuing all of our brothers and sisters who were killed and are still held captive in Gaza, but also recognising the compassion we must have for civilians in Gaza and Lebanon who are victims of the effects of Hamas and Hezbollah terrorism.
We will asked to choose faithfulness to our values of seeking peace for all involved whilst caring deeply for the security of Israelis and Palestinians to live without fear.
We can choose positive action by continuing to be engaged with Israel, supporting her people and going there if we can to show our care, come and join me on the EHRS trip to Israel in December.
This month asks us to reflect on who we have been, who we are today and who we will be. Each of us is Isaac – with the potential to be bound to patterns of the past, or to listen to the voice of God saying break free of those bonds and make this year sweet and good for others and ourselves. L’shanah Tovah u’Metukah.
