“A time that was not-time that never was…”
Why does the Jewish year begin with Rosh Hashanah? At first glance, the question appears nonsensical. Rosh Hashanah is the beginning of the Jewish year – how else could it start?
When we look at the Torah’s description of Rosh Hashanah, though, we realize that the answer isn’t so clear:
In the seventh month, in the first day of the month, shall be a solemn rest unto you, a memorial t’ruah, a holy convocation. You shall do no manner of servile work; and you shall bring an offering made by fire to the LORD. (Lev. 23:24)
In the seventh month, on the first day of the month, you shall observe a sacred occasion: you shall not work at your occupations. You shall have a day of t’ruah. You shall present a burnt offering of pleasing odor to the LORD: one bull of the herd, one ram, and seven yearling lambs, without blemish. The meal offering with them—choice flour with oil mixed in—shall be: three-tenths of a measure for a bull, two-tenths for a ram, and one-tenth for each of the seven lambs. And there shall be one goat for a sin offering, to make expiation in your behalf — in addition to the burnt offering of the new moon with its meal offering and the regular burnt offering with its meal offering, each with its libation as prescribed, offerings by fire of pleasing odor to the LORD. (Num. 29:1-6)
The most obvious issue is that Rosh Hashanah is actually not the beginning of the year; it’s the first day of the seventh month. Now, perhaps if there were something truly important and significant about Rosh Hashanah, we might be justified in rearranging the calendar so that it was the first day of the year, but the Torah actually offers no explanation as to Rosh Hashanah’s purpose. Why should a day without any clear significance get set as the start of the calendar?
As Rav Avraham Yehuda Chein writes in his essay, Hayamim Hanora’im, “[Rosh Hashanah is] not a remembrance of the exodus from Egypt, like Pesach, or a remembrance of the great and terrible wilderness like Sukkot… Nor [is it] a remembrance of Sinai, like Shavuot” (BeMalkhut HaYehadut, 136). Though Yom Kippur also doesn’t commemorate a particular event, its function is far less mysterious than Rosh Hashanah’s: “It is a day of kippurim. There is a beautiful and glorious service of the High Priest. His entrance into the holy of holies, the place closed and sealed off from every creation” (Ibid.). By contrast, “Rosh Hashanah – it alone not only has no reason for its fixed date but also has no reason as to its essence, no hint as to its purpose” (137).
Compounding its mystery is the peculiarity of the sounding of the shofar. “Not words, not song, not even musical instruments but rather – a simple voice… above speech and deeper than music” (137). “The day is a mystery,” he concludes, “and its essence is mystery.” (Ibid).
We have, then, four peculiarities (among others) regarding Rosh HaShanah:
It is not tied to a particular event.
It is unclear why it falls on the specific date that it does (especially since, according to the Biblical calendar, it falls on the first of the seventh month and not the first month).
It has no stated purpose.
The shofar is itself a peculiar instrument.
Is there a pattern to these peculiarities? And might that pattern help us understand the purpose of the day?
The answer lies, perhaps, in the ambiguous nature of a “beginning.” All beginnings are ultimately arbitrary: any event is influenced by uncountable (or, rather, all) prior events, and to designate a particular time as a “beginning” is to ignore the summed effect of all the incidents that brought it into being. As Alasdair Macintyre writes in After Virtue, “The characters [of a story] of course never start literally ab initio; they plunge in medias res, the beginnings of their story already made for them by what and who has gone before.” (215).
This helps us understand why Rosh Hashanah is both the first of the seventh month and the first of the first month: each year begins in media res, and any supposed beginning is already the seventh (or second, fifth, tenth, etc.) month of processes and stories that began before it. This is why Rosh Hashanah needs no justification or reason for its particular date: any day could be chosen as the beginning of the calendar.
The impossibility of ever non-arbitrarily defining a beginning is underscored by the opening to Mishnah Rosh HaShanah:
There are four [days that mark] New Years [roshei shanim]: On the first of Nissan, there is a rosh hashanah for kings and festivals. On the first of Elul, there is a rosh hashanah for animal tithes. Rabbi Elazar and Rabbi Shimon say on the first of Tishrei. On the first of Tishrei, there is a rosh hashanah for years, shmitah cycles, jubilee cycles, planting, and [tithing] vegetables. On the first of Shevat, there is a rosh hashanah for trees – these are the words of Beit Shammai. And Beit Hillel says, on the fifteenth. (M. Rosh Hashanah 1:1)
Without going into the specifics of what is signified by each “rosh hashanah,” it seems clear that the opening of the Mishnah is designed to play with – or undermine – our understanding of time. There isn’t a single, unified calendar – four calendars operate at once, and two of them are the subject of dispute.
But for all our discussion of the subjectivity of beginnings, the tradition does seem to argue that there was at least one definitive beginning: creation itself. But even actually look at the Torah’s account of creation, we do not find a “final” beginning. The Torah states:
When God began to create heaven and earth—
the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water—
God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. (Gen. 1:1-3)
God, obviously, “was”before creation. Creation may be the beginning of corporeal being and time, but it is preceded by Being and timelessness. This is echoed in the targum, which translates “in the beginning” as “with wisdom,” preventing its readers from mistakenly thinking that Genesis constitutes a definitive beginning. The midrash, too, proposes an earlier beginning to the beginning, stating that God used the Torah as a blueprint for creation (Genesis Rabbah 1:1). In an even more radical reading, the Zohar interprets the first sentence of the Torah as referring to an intermediate stage in the process of God’s self-emanation (1:1b), implicitly claiming that the Torah makes no attempt to describe the more supernal realms of God’s being.
That creation isn’t the beginning is affirmed by those sources that try to determine on “what day” creation happened. At first glance, these traditions do appear to argue that there really was a beginning; upon further reflection, though, we see how each helps us appreciate the limits of our relationship to and perception of time.
In the Talmud, the two possibilities given are the first of Tishrei and the first of Nissan (see b. Rosh Hashanah 10b-11a). In the midrash, the 25th of Elul is proposed (Lev. Rabbah 29:1), a position affirmed by later authorities.
All of these proposals are paradoxical. Saying that existence was created on a particular date is like saying that the big bang happened in a place. Time only “begins” within creation; it doesn’t precede it. As Rabbi Moshe Cordovero states in Sefer Alimah, creation emerged from God’s divine infinitude at “a time that is no-time that never was” (quoted in R’ Aharon HaLevi’s Shaarei HaYichud veHaEmunah, Introduction).
Rather than reading these traditions as making literal claims about what “day” things began on, perhaps we can instead read them as making claims about Rosh Hashanah’s relationship to time.
According to the first position, Rosh Hashanah was on the first day of creation. If so, Rosh Hashanah marks the transition from non-temporality to temporality; it points directly toward the void from which we are drawn but, like the Torah, does not presume to describe that realm that exists beyond time and space.
According to the final position, Rosh Hashanah was the 6th day of creation (Elul is the month before Tishrei, so if creation began on the 25th of Elul, the 6th day would fall on Rosh Hashanah). If so, Rosh Hashanah marks the evolution of sentient beings who can perceive the flow of temporality. According to this position, it is not that Rosh Hashanah commemorates the sixth day of creation but rather that it was “created” as part of it. Within this framework, Rosh Hashanah does not fall on the sixth day of creation because existence was created on the 25th of Elul; rather, because Rosh Hashanah had to be on the sixth day, we say that creation “began” on the 25th of Elul.
And according to the middle position, the first Rosh Hashanah “was” several months after creation. In this case, Rosh Hashanah has no special relationship to time until it’s set as the beginning of the calendar. If so, Rosh Hashanah specifically relates to the human demarcation of time.
Each of these possibilities about what relationship to time Rosh Hashanah gestures towards – temporality itself, our perception of it, or our ability to mark and measure it – brings us to a recognition of the limits of our temporal consciousness. We cannot really conceptualize the vastness of time, let alone imagine reality without it. Time is a light shown in a dark forest; it illuminates what lies within its sphere but makes us equally cognizant of that which falls beyond its range.
When we celebrate Rosh Hashanah, we remind ourselves that our true beginning lies before the calendar, our experience of time and time itself. Before everything, there was… Even the word “was” misconstrues the nature of pre-creation, since “was” implies a sense of time and space. On Rosh Hashanah, we realize the contingency of all of our attempts to locate a “true” beginning and we come to understand that all of being comes from a source with no beginning or end. Time lies within God, but God does not lie within time.
Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi teaches that in order for a universe bounded by time and space to exist within a God unbounded by time and space, God must continually and repeatedly renew creation:
If the letters [that undergird existence and through which God created the world] were to disappear for a moment, God forbid, and return to their source, all of the heavens would become null and nothingness, and it would be as if nothing were at all… and so too with all of the creations in all of the upper and lower worlds, and even this corporeal earth… everything would be null and nothingness as it was before the six days of creation. (Tanya, Sha’ar YaYichud veHaEmunah, Ch. 1)
At all moments, God brings forth existence from “no-time” and no-space and Nothing. Perhaps this is why we say “Today is the birth of the world” specifically on a day whose very arbitrariness undermines our understanding of time. Rosh Hashanah is the birth of the world because each day and each moment is the birth of the world.
This, perhaps, offers us a hint as to the role of the shofar. On Rosh Hashanah, with an awareness of the infinitude that lies beyond us, we come to the limits of our abilities of expression. Language cannot capture that which precedes differentiation. The shofar offers us a pure, singular sound, unencumbered by the constraints of language.
But even the shofar does not fully capture the expanse we seek to describe. The shofar is still a sound, and how could any sound articulate that which is beyond time and space? And so it is the silence after the shofar blasts that comes closest to expressing the infinitude of God.
The movement from language to sound to silence actualized by the shofar is an inversion of the process of creation as described in the Torah, in which words emerge from the void. In returning to the silence that precedes the word, we seek an encounter with the One who precedes the beginning.
It is strange that precisely on a day that gestures to the endless expanse of existence, we mark a new year of earthly living and pray for health and success. At the same time that we contemplate the infinite, we attend to the mundane. In the contrast, we encounter what Thomas Nagel terms “the absurd”:
We cannot live human lives without energy and attention, nor without making choices which show that we take some things more seriously than others. Yet we have always available a point of view outside the particular form of our lives, from which the seriousness appears gratuitous. These two inescapable viewpoints collide in us, and that is what makes life absurd. It is absurd because we ignore the doubts that we know cannot be settled, continuing to live with nearly undiminished seriousness in spite of them. (“The Absurd,” Journal of Philosophy 68:20 (October 1971):719)
How can we seek to return to God’s infinitude and, at the same time, care about our earthly concerns? More importantly, why does the Day require us to do both when the contrast it engenders brings us face to face with the absurdity of our lives?
Disputing those who see such absurdity as a problem and seek either an escape from it or means of confronting it, Nagel writes,
Our absurdity warrants neither that much distress nor that much defiance. At the risk of falling into romanticism by a different route, I would argue that absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics… it is possible only because we possess a certain kind of insight-the capacity to transcend ourselves in thought… [and] it results from the ability to understand our human limitation. (726-727)
Would we really want to live less absurd lives? We could only do so by forfeiting either the wonder, love, heartbreak, awe, grief, joy, pain, and serenity of our day-to-day lives or our curiosity about the vastness of the universe and what lies beyond it.
Rosh Hashanah affirms the importance of both. In spite of that vastness, our small, quirky lives, loves and losses have meaning; and in spite of how big our lives seem to us, there is something far bigger beyond them. The details are endless, and there is an endlessness beyond the possibility of detail. All of it is part of God: chopping garlic, the big bang, cutting toenails, Andromeda, blueberries, black holes, blessings.