FRIDAY WAS A Bahá’í holy day, in the Holy Land, commemorating the Martyrdom of the Báb, the forerunner and herald of Bahá’u’lláh. We attended a beautifully sunlit, but nevertheless solemn, programme in the vicinity of the Shrine of the Báb in Haifa around noon, and then visited the Shrine of Bahá’u’lláh in the afternoon.
However, that is not what I am going to talk about here, since others surely have elsewhere; this weekend is a particularly holy weekend in the Holy Land since it sees not only a Bahá’í holy day, but also comes just before the beginning of the Muslim month of Ramadan, and linking the two is the Jewish celebration of Rosh HaShanah, or the New Year.
AFTER A BRIEF interlude, the Jewish festival season is picking up once again, beginning (altogether appropriately, I feel) with the New Year. In fact, the months of September and October this year contain the vast majority of the Jewish holy days, it would seem, and hopefully I’ll be quick enough on my feet to write a little bit about each one.
Rosh HaShanah is a two-day holy day, celebrated on the 1st and 2nd days of the month of Tishri, marking the Jewish New Year. This year (2006 A.D.), it started at nightfall on Friday 22nd September and continues on until dusk on Sunday 24th September. This is because the Jewish day, like the Bahá’í day, starts at sundown the evening before the actual day itself (an interesting fact to note when considering the origin of the practice of recognising various ‘eve’s, like Christmas Eve, in the West).
This year’s Rosh HaShanah marks the beginning of the Jewish year 5767. And you thought anything above 2000 sounded like a big number?! Sorry, but the Jews beat everyone else hands down in the “whose calendar is bigger?” stakes.
Rosh HaShanah is also known as Yom HaZikkaron (Day of Remembrance) or Yom Teruah (Day of the Sounding of the Shofar – the shofar is a large ram’s horn sounded 100 times in the synagogue). For more info on that, go here.
Also, please view this interesting Web page for information about customs and beliefs related to this solemn day, including the judgement of the world for the year to come and the practice of saying a special prayer, the Amidah - Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur are two holy days when Jews say different liturgies (prayers and readings) than other days of the year.
The big question, of course, is: Why two days? Well, this apparently has to do with the method of deciding when the new year takes place and the time it used to take to notify everyone: The Jewish calendar, like the Islamic calendar, is essentially lunar (although the Jewish calendar has leap years that put it back in sync with the solar year when it gets too far out, unlike the Islamic calendar, which is purely lunar). Being a lunar calendar means that the timing of major events – holy days and even the beginnings of months – is decided based on when the new moon is ‘spotted’; the New Year is not automatically on a certain date every year, but rather, it depends on when the moon is spotted.
In the case of Jewish events, the timing would be determined at the Temple in Jerusalem and then the news sent out throughout the country. In a time before the advent of telegraph, telephone, radio, television and then Internet, once the date of the holy day was determined, it might take some time for far-away communities to be informed, by runner, that the festival had begun. This could only have become further complicated with the Diaspora in the early years A.D. Thus, the Jews came up with the novel method of having a two-day celebration – thereby ensuring that communities that only heard the good news shortly before the end of the day, or even on the next, would still be able to celebrate the holy day in accordance with Jewish law. This was apparently the case for other holy days, but only with Rosh HaShanah has it stuck.
ONE OTHER INTERESTING point of note is that it appears that the beginning of the Jewish year may have been different earlier in history. For example, whilst Rosh HaShanah is celebrated at the beginning of the month of Tishri, the first month of the Jewish calendar (seems logical, no?), Leviticus 23.5 states that the spring festival of Pesach (Passover) is celebrated in the first month (it is celebrated in Nissan, now the seventh month), implying that the calendar may once have begun with Nissan. It is also interesting that the extra month of Adar II, which is inserted in leap years, comes just before Nissan, possibly at once time the end of the year, rather than being in the middle, as it is now…and the Rabbis apparently discussed all this in the Talmud without resolving the issue entirely…although Passover is considered to be the beginning of the year for festivals. All very intriguing!
IN ANY CASE, returning to the present day, Rosh HaShanah is notable to the non-Jew principally by the fact the streets are empty and everything is closed; we had been thinking of visiting Nazareth today (a Christian town and therefore one we hoped would be open on this Jewish very holy day). Alas! There were no sheruts to be had (we didn’t book one in advance like some others, nor had we hired a car) and so we instead spent a leisurely day in sunny Nahariyyah, up the coast from Acre, from where we could see Rosh HaNiqra, the attractive headland which marks the border with Lebanon.
(Posted by J.)
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