A New Year

Today is my 23rd birthday. When I was quite young I hit upon 23 as a personal magical number, and every since then I have been looking forward to and dreading turning twenty three. There's a lot riding on this year, symbolically. This is the year I will be married (that was intentional, when we picked the date), and Hashem only knows what else might be in store before I turn twenty four.

The Jewish calender puts the new year in the fall. My impression (don't quote me on this, I might be wrong) is that the calendar itself is actually counted from around Pesach, in the spring, but Rosh Hashanah is the birthday of creation, and thus the beginning of a new year. It's strange, starting out the year when the leaves are falling and and harvest is coming in. Spring is definitely a more logical time for a year to start (the new year use to be March 25 before Europe switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar), but the Jews eat apples and honey and wish each other a sweet new year in the midst of gathering in the fruits of their labors in the previous year. Instead of starting fresh, we start when we are most heavily loaded with the consequences of our work or neglect the year before, and when the worst is not behind us but yet to come. The days are getting rapidly shorter, the weather will soon turn cold and hunger will find us eventually as our stores run low, or even if we do not go hungry we will reach a point where we have not seen fresh greens in way too long. And yet this was when G-d created the world.

Can you imagine that first spring? I was born in the fall, so I must have once experienced something like that. After fall came winter, and everything good and loaded with promise seemed to disappear overnight, to vanish into the short, cold days and long, frosty nights. And then there would come a change in the weather, and suddenly life would come back into the world with such fresh and tender vigor it would be astounding. To see spring green and the bright riot of wild flowers for the very first time in the history of the world would be to have all of one's assumptions about the nature of G-d and Creation shaken, uprooted, overturned.

May this be a year of change equal to the change in the seasons, a sweet year where we carry with us all the good we have collected and add some more to it for the year to follow. L'shana Tova to you all.