L’shana Tova! (A good year!)

Tomorrow we pass through the gate of the first day of Tishrei, Rosh Hoshana, the head of the New Year. This moment provides a cosmic pause between the year before and the year ahead, in breath and out breath, fruit and seed, harvesting and sowing, dry and wet. This is a very sacred time when the world and we hang in the balance as we take stock of how we got to this moment over the course of the year, and how we want to go into the next year.

The Sefer Yetzira (“Book of Formation”), the earliest of our mystical manuals, explains, “In the beginning there is an end and in the end there is a beginning.” This is precisely where we stand in this moment—the end and the beginning. We enter a liminal space, like that magical transition time between midnight and sunrise, where everything can be revealed, everything can be healed, and anything is possible.

After blowing shofar for the last 30 days to wake up and prepare during the days of Elul, it’s now time. The Book of Life, our sages teach us, opens tomorrow and we are invited to do our teshuva, our “spiritual return”—work of reflection and relationship repair during a sacred period we call the “Days of Awe” (ימים נוראים)—a period of ten days between Rosh Hoshana and Yom Kippur. These days are like days out of time when the only things that really matter are our relationships—to ourselves, to our human relations, to the earth, and to the Force that enlivens the world.

The letters of Tishrei in Hebrew (תשרי) permute to spell the word “beginning,”reisheit (רשית), which make the first word of Torah (ברשית). Thus tomorrow marks the opportunity for renewal, for a new beginning. We celebrate this day with apples and honey—honoring the harvest that we are bringing in while calling for sweetness in the coming year. We are also invited to engage in our deepest reflection of the year. How have we acted in the previous year? What forgiveness must we seek and offer? What will we harvest, and what seeds will we sew? What are we calling ourselves up to for the coming year?

In ancient times, we deeply understood this to be a precarious time, for the rains had been dormant for nearly six months and everything was extremely dry. This time of reflection, forgiveness, and realignment was not just a process of self-help or a community relations improvement project—in fact it was a matter of survival. We deeply understood that our conduct affected the material world, particularly the balance of rain. The second paragraph of theShema, our central prayer which we traditionally offer twice each day, quotes the Torah: “If you follow the sacred law, which connects you to the sacred by loving and serving with all your heart and with all your soul, then I will provide rain for your land in its proper time…” (Deut. 11:13–21). If it was true then, perhaps it remains true today.

During this month of Tishrei, after the Days of Awe, we immediately get ready for Sukkot, which in ancient times was centrally focused on the rains themselves. For at the beginning of Sukkot we honored and celebrated the waters with the biggest party of the year, Simchat Beit Hashoeva (“Rejoicing of the House of the Drawing”), where we poured water on stone in the Temple and then celebrated in faith that the waters would come. At the end of Sukkot we began our rain prayers for the coming season with an ancient shamanic rite of circle dancing and beating willows on the ground. The water rites worked, we are told, but only as well as the people had prepared themselves during the Days of Awe. For during the Days of Awe we humans are judged and inscribed for the next year—and subsequently during Sukkot, the rains are judged. (Rosh Ha-Shanah 16a).

Today we hang in the balance in our tender hearts and our dry, tender land. Our reservoirs are half-empty across the state; fires rage across our lands. This just touches the surface of the challenges we face in our world today. As we finish another year, let us take these next ten days and fill them with awe, truly reflecting on the challenges we face inside our hearts and inside our relations. Let’s pause to connect with each other and forgive things big and small, and then let’s join together and turn out to the world to pray for our beloved Creation.

L’shana tova tikatev v’taihatem.
(May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year.)