Have a thoughtful new year
New year holidays are interesting things. Somewhere on our calendar, we humans mark an arbitrary division between one year and the next, not representing any real change in the world around us. The natural world doesn't notice that we have changed the year number on our calendars, and yet we feel that something rather cosmic is happening, possibly something deeply personal as well. One way or another, we are aware at the marking of a new year that this is a time of endings and beginnings, both inside and out.
And our reactions to this are somewhat bipolar.
On the one hand, a new year is a time for celebration: we celebrate having survived yet another year, and we celebrate having another year to look forward to. In our secular New Year, at least here in America, we hold or attend lavish parties, staying up until midnight to experience the last few minutes of the old year and the first few minutes of the new. Oddly enough, by doing this we don't actually celebrate much of the new year at all: mainly, we party the old year out and then as soon as the new year is a few minutes old, we decide we've had enough of it already.
Jews celebrate a bit differently, perhaps because we mark the change of years, as with the change of days, at sundown rather than at midnight. Our New Year celebrations (and, not to be outdone by anybody in terms of packing our calendar with observances, Jews have between three and five New Years scattered throughout each calendar year) begin around the time that the new year begins -- 18 minutes before sundown, officially -- and carry on for some part of the evening and some part of the next day.
The New Year we just observed, the religious new year and the "birthday of the world," the day most people think of as the "Jewish New Year," the day on which we increase the year number printed on our Hebrew calendars, is Rosh HaShanah -- literally, "head of the year."
And while we may not hold quite the lavish stay-up-till-midnight parties that accompany the Gregorian new year, we do celebrate.
We gather to wish one another L'Shanah Tovah ("to a good year"), perhaps adding uMetukah ("and a sweet one"). This last wish, for a "sweet" new year, inspires a good number of our other celebrations: we bake round, extra-sweet honey challah (to symbolize both the circle of the year and its potential sweetness), we dip apples in honey, we bake honey cakes and other confections, and we eat fruits of all sorts, but especially those that come newly ripe in this season (hard to find in Texas).
We gather to pray, to hear the shofar blown, to sing, to nosh, and to socialize. We wear new clothes just to revel in their newness. And, this year at least, my family and I have grooved out to the tunes of myriad Rosh HaShanah-themed YouTube musical numbers.
To give you a glimpse of Rosh HaShanah celebration with a goofball twist and about a hundred cultural references, here is one of our favorites, "Dip Your Apple," by the Ein Prat Fountainheads.
But on the other hand, new years are not only times of celebration. They are also times of contemplation and reflection, of looking back and looking forward, of taking stock and seeking inspiration, of deciding what we like about ourselves and what we want to change.
In the secular New Year, at least here in America, the media are full of best and worst of the year articles, year in review issues, and predictions for the year ahead. In our personal lives, we look back at a year of hopes and dreams fulfilled and unfulfilled, and we make a half-hearted attempt at self improvement in the form of "New Year's Resolutions" that rarely, if ever, get kept for more than a week.
And it is here that Rosh HaShanah starts to look different from a secular New Year. It is said that on Rosh HaShanah every living soul passes before the throne of God, for those who merit another year of life on earth to be inscribed in the Book of Life. For "we of little merit" (and who among us can claim God-satisfying perfection in the year just past?), the sound of the shofar is meant as a wake-up call to tell us that we have 9 more days to get our affairs in order so that, even if we may not have made God's "first cut" for the Book of Life, perhaps we can convince the Eternal that we have what it takes to change, for real and enough to count for something, in the next year.
And that personal-spiritual wake-up call makes it a new year's day like no other. Somber. Cutting. And yet hopeful.
When Jews set out to conduct a self-inventory, it seems, we are to really mean it, and to be uncompromising in our self-criticism. But we are not to give up on ourselves, because after all God hasn't given up on us. And when we make plans for self improvement in the new year, we are not talking about a few more hours at the gym, cutting back on sugary sodas, or finally finishing one of those household projects we've been dallying around for years. We are giving ourselves the task of rooting out our deepest flaws and replacing them with the kind of behaviors, the kind of character attributes, the kind of attitudes we have always wanted to see in ourselves.
We are given the opportunity to reinvent ourselves for a new year, aiming to get a little bit closer to that ideal of perfection. A good song for this more somber view of the new year is "Starting Over," by Six13.
So where does that leave me, this Rosh HaShanah? A good deal more laid back about it than last year -- as I take one of my rabbis' advice to not try so hard to do it all myself, to let my religious community work its strange magic and to fit in what I can at home on my own schedule -- and yet a good deal more serious about it as well.
As our community gathered to do tashlich, the scattering of bread crumbs on the water, each bearing away one sin or regret we have been holding onto from the past year, I found myself naming a great number of the things I have been concerned about lately. My family life fraying at the edges, my work schedule seeming unmanageable, my fear of letting everyone -- students, children, spouse, extended family, friends, myself -- down when it becomes ultimately clear that I can't do it all.
And that's when I had to make the hardest new year's resolution I've ever faced: I need to discipline myself, to stop trying to do everything, if I am going to do an even good-enough job at any of the things I have to do. I need to set my schedule of work to do at work, and to be left at work. I need to set my schedule of people and tasks to look after at home, and to give my family my full attention when I'm there. I need to claim a few hours a week for one project, not a half dozen, to feed my creative side. And I need to claim a few hours more for recreation and community and feeding my soul. And I need to cut it off there. Put on the shelf, for now, my dreams of rabbinical school, of becoming the next Jewish writer or the next app store programming success or the next anatomy textbook author. One of those things might come, someday, but this is not the day. And fretting about trying to make it this day is tearing me apart from the inside out. For now, my job is to be the best professor I can be during work hours, the best parent and husband I can be during home hours, and to try to carve out some time somewhere to be the best me I can manage.
So, yeah, this year I will be trying to cut out some of those empty carbs that might lead me to reinact my father's bout with diabetes, but I will also be cutting out some of those distracting might-be's and might-have-been's that keep me from doing a good job of being who I am today. And that may be harder even than dropping my daily Dr. Pepper.
Lastly, in thinking about all of this, I realized something else. Even if you, like me, don't really believe that God is sitting up there recording our deeds in a book that will determine our blessings or curses for the year to come, Rosh HaShanah has a meaning and a purpose. The momentum you have built in your life so far has set you on a course that you will stay on, whether you like it or not, unless you make a great effort to make a turn. Turning -- in Hebrew, teshuvah, in English, repentance -- is one of the hardest things to do in life. It helps to do it with a friend, with a partner, with a community, with a people. That's the real reason we come together on Rosh HaShanah.
And on that note, I offer you the most inspiring of the YouTube songs we've been rocking out to this High Holy Day season, "Book of Good Life," by the Yeshiva University Maccabeats
Shanah Tovah uMetukah. May your 5777 be both good and sweet.
And our reactions to this are somewhat bipolar.
On the one hand, a new year is a time for celebration: we celebrate having survived yet another year, and we celebrate having another year to look forward to. In our secular New Year, at least here in America, we hold or attend lavish parties, staying up until midnight to experience the last few minutes of the old year and the first few minutes of the new. Oddly enough, by doing this we don't actually celebrate much of the new year at all: mainly, we party the old year out and then as soon as the new year is a few minutes old, we decide we've had enough of it already.
Jews celebrate a bit differently, perhaps because we mark the change of years, as with the change of days, at sundown rather than at midnight. Our New Year celebrations (and, not to be outdone by anybody in terms of packing our calendar with observances, Jews have between three and five New Years scattered throughout each calendar year) begin around the time that the new year begins -- 18 minutes before sundown, officially -- and carry on for some part of the evening and some part of the next day.
The New Year we just observed, the religious new year and the "birthday of the world," the day most people think of as the "Jewish New Year," the day on which we increase the year number printed on our Hebrew calendars, is Rosh HaShanah -- literally, "head of the year."
And while we may not hold quite the lavish stay-up-till-midnight parties that accompany the Gregorian new year, we do celebrate.
We gather to wish one another L'Shanah Tovah ("to a good year"), perhaps adding uMetukah ("and a sweet one"). This last wish, for a "sweet" new year, inspires a good number of our other celebrations: we bake round, extra-sweet honey challah (to symbolize both the circle of the year and its potential sweetness), we dip apples in honey, we bake honey cakes and other confections, and we eat fruits of all sorts, but especially those that come newly ripe in this season (hard to find in Texas).
We gather to pray, to hear the shofar blown, to sing, to nosh, and to socialize. We wear new clothes just to revel in their newness. And, this year at least, my family and I have grooved out to the tunes of myriad Rosh HaShanah-themed YouTube musical numbers.
To give you a glimpse of Rosh HaShanah celebration with a goofball twist and about a hundred cultural references, here is one of our favorites, "Dip Your Apple," by the Ein Prat Fountainheads.
But on the other hand, new years are not only times of celebration. They are also times of contemplation and reflection, of looking back and looking forward, of taking stock and seeking inspiration, of deciding what we like about ourselves and what we want to change.
In the secular New Year, at least here in America, the media are full of best and worst of the year articles, year in review issues, and predictions for the year ahead. In our personal lives, we look back at a year of hopes and dreams fulfilled and unfulfilled, and we make a half-hearted attempt at self improvement in the form of "New Year's Resolutions" that rarely, if ever, get kept for more than a week.
And it is here that Rosh HaShanah starts to look different from a secular New Year. It is said that on Rosh HaShanah every living soul passes before the throne of God, for those who merit another year of life on earth to be inscribed in the Book of Life. For "we of little merit" (and who among us can claim God-satisfying perfection in the year just past?), the sound of the shofar is meant as a wake-up call to tell us that we have 9 more days to get our affairs in order so that, even if we may not have made God's "first cut" for the Book of Life, perhaps we can convince the Eternal that we have what it takes to change, for real and enough to count for something, in the next year.
And that personal-spiritual wake-up call makes it a new year's day like no other. Somber. Cutting. And yet hopeful.
When Jews set out to conduct a self-inventory, it seems, we are to really mean it, and to be uncompromising in our self-criticism. But we are not to give up on ourselves, because after all God hasn't given up on us. And when we make plans for self improvement in the new year, we are not talking about a few more hours at the gym, cutting back on sugary sodas, or finally finishing one of those household projects we've been dallying around for years. We are giving ourselves the task of rooting out our deepest flaws and replacing them with the kind of behaviors, the kind of character attributes, the kind of attitudes we have always wanted to see in ourselves.
We are given the opportunity to reinvent ourselves for a new year, aiming to get a little bit closer to that ideal of perfection. A good song for this more somber view of the new year is "Starting Over," by Six13.
So where does that leave me, this Rosh HaShanah? A good deal more laid back about it than last year -- as I take one of my rabbis' advice to not try so hard to do it all myself, to let my religious community work its strange magic and to fit in what I can at home on my own schedule -- and yet a good deal more serious about it as well.
As our community gathered to do tashlich, the scattering of bread crumbs on the water, each bearing away one sin or regret we have been holding onto from the past year, I found myself naming a great number of the things I have been concerned about lately. My family life fraying at the edges, my work schedule seeming unmanageable, my fear of letting everyone -- students, children, spouse, extended family, friends, myself -- down when it becomes ultimately clear that I can't do it all.
And that's when I had to make the hardest new year's resolution I've ever faced: I need to discipline myself, to stop trying to do everything, if I am going to do an even good-enough job at any of the things I have to do. I need to set my schedule of work to do at work, and to be left at work. I need to set my schedule of people and tasks to look after at home, and to give my family my full attention when I'm there. I need to claim a few hours a week for one project, not a half dozen, to feed my creative side. And I need to claim a few hours more for recreation and community and feeding my soul. And I need to cut it off there. Put on the shelf, for now, my dreams of rabbinical school, of becoming the next Jewish writer or the next app store programming success or the next anatomy textbook author. One of those things might come, someday, but this is not the day. And fretting about trying to make it this day is tearing me apart from the inside out. For now, my job is to be the best professor I can be during work hours, the best parent and husband I can be during home hours, and to try to carve out some time somewhere to be the best me I can manage.
So, yeah, this year I will be trying to cut out some of those empty carbs that might lead me to reinact my father's bout with diabetes, but I will also be cutting out some of those distracting might-be's and might-have-been's that keep me from doing a good job of being who I am today. And that may be harder even than dropping my daily Dr. Pepper.
Lastly, in thinking about all of this, I realized something else. Even if you, like me, don't really believe that God is sitting up there recording our deeds in a book that will determine our blessings or curses for the year to come, Rosh HaShanah has a meaning and a purpose. The momentum you have built in your life so far has set you on a course that you will stay on, whether you like it or not, unless you make a great effort to make a turn. Turning -- in Hebrew, teshuvah, in English, repentance -- is one of the hardest things to do in life. It helps to do it with a friend, with a partner, with a community, with a people. That's the real reason we come together on Rosh HaShanah.
And on that note, I offer you the most inspiring of the YouTube songs we've been rocking out to this High Holy Day season, "Book of Good Life," by the Yeshiva University Maccabeats
Shanah Tovah uMetukah. May your 5777 be both good and sweet.
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