musings on erev Rosh Hashana

Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur bracket the Yamim Noraim, the ten days of awe, but the season really begins before Rosh Hashana. During the whole month of Elul we're supposed to be preparing; we hear the shofar every morning to remind us. (Except today, actually -- we don't sound it right before the holiday.) While we have until Yom Kippur (or, according to some, even later) to seek forgiveness and make amends for the wrongs we've done, we can and should start well before Rosh Hashana, the day of judgement. Someone on my reading list (I forget who; please identify yourself if you see this) charactized this as saving God some writing and erasing -- if we clear up the problem before God records the deed on Rosh Hashana, God doesn't then have to erase it on Yom Kippur after we fix it. I like that bit of motivation. It's not that it never happened; we're still accountable. But by being proactive we can lessen the burden a bit, a good general lesson for any time of year.

But as a consequence of all of this, I don't connect as much as I should with Rosh Hashana as the (big, singular) day of judgement. It's more like the day of the preliminary hearing. It's important, but it's not the final word. I'm more afraid of Yom Kippur than of Rosh Hashana. I'm not trying to make light of it; I'm just trying to see it in context. I know that others, while beginning their preparations earlier, can appreciate the gravity of the day better than I can now, so maybe I'll get there.

We celebrate Rosh Hashana as the birthday of the world and acknowledge it as the day of judgement. Two themes, seemingly very different but maybe not so different after all. We're all used to the annual performance review and the annual reconciling of financial accounts (and payment of taxes). These are tied to points in time. So, too, the birthday of the world seems a good day for the divine evaluation of the world's residents. (And as my associate rabbi pointed out last night, while this is a Jewish holiday, there's nothing specifically Jewish about its themes -- it's not like, say, Pesach, that commemorates an event specifically in Jewish history. We all have a share in the world and all who believe in God have to settle our accounts.)

I was thinking, last night at ma'ariv, that the day and the year have something in common. We begin the day not at the artifical hour of midnight or at the seemingly-natural time of sunrise, but rather at sunset, as twilight comes to be followed by night. At the beginning of the day things start to darken, with the most challenging or dangerous times to come in a few hours, but by the mid-point (mid-day, so to speak) things are brightening up and the day reaches a climax in light and warmth. So too with the year -- we begin it now, as autumn comes to be followed by the cold, dark winter, but we know that spring and summer are coming. (What's the mid-point of the year? Roughly Pesach.) There's even a rabbinic tradition that the first Rosh Hashana was not on the first day of creation but on the sixth, the day man was created, after which things went downhill rather quickly but will ultimately end in redemption.

Maybe that's the connection -- things seem darker now, as we are being judged and found wanting, but the coming year will grow warm again and we will too, God willing, if we take action. Either that, or I'm reading way too much into this.