Double New Year?
We are a complicated people.
While most cultures and people celebrate their new year on the first day of the first month of their calendar, we Jews, surprisingly, do not do the same.
Our new year, Rosh Hashanah, is celebrated on the first day of the seventh month. As the Torah relates:
In the seventh month, on the first of the month, it shall be a Sabbath for you, a remembrance of [Israel through] the shofar blast a holy occasion.[1]
Half a year after new year's day, we celebrate the new year. As the Torah tells us in this week’s portion, the very first commandment issued to the Jewish people, just days before the Exodus, was the commandment to establish the Hebrew calendar, which would establish the month of the exodus as the first month. As the Torah relates:
The Lord spoke to Moses and to Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying: This month shall be to you the head of the months; to you it shall be the first of the months of the year.[2]
Why the complication? Why do the Jewish people need to have two new years, one for the days of the year and one for the months of the year?
When we look at the world around us we notice that there are generally two tracks by which the world operates. The first is the natural, predictable order. The sun rises and sets, the seasons flow from one to the next, the agricultural cycle produces its crops. The first track is the one we call the path of nature.
The second track is the one of the extraordinary and the unexpected. In every area in life there are moments that defy the predictions, shatter the expectations and leave us in a better place than we could have ever imagined. The second track we call the miraculous path.
Both tracks, the miraculous and the natural, lead to the same unified source, they are both expressions of the one G-d.[3] Judaism explains that both the ordinary as well as the extraordinary are expressions of the Divine. The consistent, unchanging, laws of nature, express the infinity of G-d just as powerfully as the miraculous and the unexpected, the rising sun is just as impressive an expression of the Divine as the splitting of the sea.
Thus Jews celebrate two new years in order to commemorate both aspects of Divine expression. On Rosh Hashanah, in the beginning of the fall, the opening of the agricultural cycle which follows the cycle of the sun, we are celebrating the Divine power expressed within the natural order. Just as the sun appears the same everyday, we need to excel in the realm of the predictable. If we want to reap the produce, we must plow and sow, following the order of nature established by G-d as an expression of his awesome power.
Six months later, we celebrate the new year for the months. We celebrate G-d’s unexpected, miraculous, blessings. As we celebrate the moon’s ability to reappear and reemerge, we remind ourselves of our own gift to miraculously reappear out of the darkness of the sky. We celebrate the supernatural blessings G-d has performed for his people and the ability He instilled within us to free ourselves from the confines of the predictable, and achieve the miraculous.
[1] Leviticus 23:24.
[2] Exodus 12:1-2.
[3] See Hachodesh 5666.