Rosh Hashana, The Jewish New Year
Amid the feasting and good wishes, observant Jews also spend time contemplating their past actions and making resolutions for positive change. Before the holiday, friends and even enemies ask each other for forgiveness. Everyone wants to arrive at Rosh Hashanah with a clean slate.
Amid the feasting and good wishes, observant Jews also spend time contemplating their past actions and making resolutions for positive change. Before the holiday, friends and even enemies ask each other for forgiveness. Everyone wants to arrive at Rosh Hashanah with a clean slate.
Celebrating Rosh Hashanah
Rosh Hashanah is at least in part a celebration of the New Year, and that means four festive meals to mark the occasion. These meals are held after the evening and daily prayers. Meals on Rosh Hashanah consist of numerous symbolic foods that are connected with welcoming the new year.
It’s a custom to eat sweet foods on Rosh Hashanah, to represent the sweetness that we wish for in the coming year. The apple and honey are the prime example of this: before eating the apple and honey, Jews make a blessing for a sweet new year.
Conversely, it’s customary to avoid sour or bitter foods. All this is connected with the idea that everything we do, eat, or say during Rosh Hashanah will have an impact on the rest of the year.
Praying on Rosh Hashanah
Aside from being a time of celebration, Rosh Hashanah is a time of intense prayer and contemplation. The daytime prayers in synagogue begin in the morning and can last until late in the afternoon. Since there is a huge number of synagogues in Jerusalem, there is an infinite variety of prayer services, from ultra-Orthodox to mystical to Reform.
But what is most remarkable about Rosh Hashanah prayers is the shofar, a ram’s horn which is blown several times throughout the day. The strident and majestic call of the shofar is a call to repentance, but it is other things as well: it is also a call to awaken, and to realize the ultimate solemnity of existence.
The themes of Rosh Hashanah prayer are repentance, forgiveness, and mortality. Jews believe that on Rosh Hashanah, God decides who will live and who will die over the course of the year. For this reason, Jews wish one another “Ktiva V’Chatima Tova”—which loosely translates as “You should be written and signed for the good”, i.e., in the Book of Life.
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