A Rosh ha-Shanah Card, 5779

 

“A day on which the horn is sounded” (Num 29:1)—is this really the best that the Torah could do to describe Rosh ha-Shanah? Perhaps it was all that needed to be said back then. After all, the entrance of a mighty king was regularly announced with a blast of trumpets, and why would the heavenly King be entering the human realm if not to judge His subjects? So today as well, the shofar’s first meaning, before all the other ones that are given—the ram’s horn commemorates the ram that was offered by Abraham instead of his son Isaac; the ram’s horn is sounded to call to mind the shofar blasts at Mount Sinai (Exod 19:19), or to awake people from the spiritual slumber, or to scare off malevolent demons—was that the King is about to enter the human hall and judge us for the coming year.

 

But truly, was that such a great arrangement? Wouldn’t it make more sense for the Almighty to judge each offender on the spot and carry out the sentence while the crime was still fresh in everyone’s memory?

 

But that’s just the point. If people were punished immediately, say, with a bolt of lightning from heaven, I’m sure that after a while, onlookers would get the idea of why such punishments were meted out, and they might indeed be frightened. But they would still be missing that element in divine-human relations that is absolutely crucial for Judaism: repentance. Allotting people a set of ten days each year, from Rosh ha-Shanah through Yom Kippur, was a way of allowing them turn their thoughts to the preceding weeks and months and set out to effect a complete change in direction (this is the original meaning of teshuvah).

 

If it were being conceived of today, the process of God’s simultaneously judging everyone all at once could be accomplished by a simple mouse-click or key-stroke on the celestial computer. The Mishnah instead describes Rosh ha-Shanah in then-contemporary military terms: “all people pass before Him as soldiers in a military troop (Latin numerus).” Either way, the process needn’t take ten days—surely one day of repentance would be enough. But if the Day of Atonement has been accorded a fixed date on the tenth of the month (an odd time for any significant day on the Hebrew calendar), it is to give people some time to reconsider, starting from the first day of the month. TO put it a little differently, the whole reason for Rosh ha-Shanah is Yom Kippur, or rather, the ten days that separate the two. (Starting now.)

 

With best wishes for the coming year,

Shanah tovah!