By Dan Brosgol
With the new school year already having been rung in, it’s time for that other back-to-school tradition… missing school and work for Rosh Hashanah. For those of you who have been wondering for years and years about what the holiday is all about, well, here are a few questions about Rosh Hashanah that you may have been dying to ask.
What is Rosh Hashanah?
Literally translated it means “head of the year,” but everyone knows it as the Jewish New Year. It’s mostly correct, although an old Rabbinic tradition actually named four new years in Judaism, and this is just one of them. But that’s a story for another time. Or for right now if you’re curious.
Is there one of those guttural “chhhh” sounds like in Chanukah with some of those letters in Rosh Hashanah?
Don’t worry. No. It’s a very friendly-to-pronounce holiday.
Wasn’t Rosh Hashanah on a different day last year?
Absolutely. Since the Jewish year runs on a lunar calendar of 354 or 355 days, the holidays shift 10 or 11 days earlier every year. But to prevent the calendar drift of Chanukah into summer or Passover into late fall, we add a leap month to the calendar in 7 out of 19 years of the Metonic Cycle. Bonus points if you’ve heard that term before.
What’s with eating apples and honey?
Jews traditionally greet each other on Rosh Hashanah with the phrase shana tovah u’metukah– have a sweet new year. With that in mind, we eat sweet foods to hopefully usher in a sweet new year. Honey and apples were consumed in Biblical Israel and you can still find beehives and apple orchards in modern-day Israel, so this is a practice that goes back a long time. If you’ve read about Jonathan eating honey out of the beehives in the First Book of Samuel, or the “love apples” from Genesis, then perhaps you have a sense of the history of these not-often-attributed-to-the-Middle-East delicacies.
I’m confused. Is Rosh Hashanah one day or two?
That depends. In ancient times, when Jews measured their years by the phases of the moon, there was sometimes uncertainty about when, precisely, it was a new moon. A special court would actually be called into session to officially certify the new moon and to spread the word to far-flung communities in Israel to get everyone on the same calendar page. The delay in the news reaching those communities led to the observance of two days of the festivals just to be safe. In current times, Jews in Israel no longer celebrate two days of the festivals, but more observant Jews in America and other diaspora countries still maintain the tradition, while less observant Jews typically only celebrate one day. The big twist on this, though, is that Rosh Hashanah is the only exception to the rule in Israel, so two days of Rosh Hashanah are observed there as well. I know. It’s confusing. Sorry.
Are there other rituals besides going to synagogue?
If you happen to be walking by a body of water on Monday afternoon and see a whole bunch of people throwing bread into it, don’t be alarmed- it’s just tashlich, the practice of casting bread on moving water to symbolically cast one’s sins away in preparation for Yom Kippur. It’s a practice that originated in the Middle Ages and has become quite popular in recent years. Keep in mind that it’s actually preferable to throw the bread into water in which fish and animals will consume it.
Also, in the realm of the spiritual, Jewish tradition holds that the Book of Life is opened on Rosh Hashanah and closed on Yom Kippur, so Jews must atone and seek forgiveness for their sins and misdeeds in these ten days of awe. The Sabbath in between the two High Holidays is supposed to be the day when you personally seek forgiveness from those you have wronged.
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