Rosh Hashanah
Family Edition

Much like our Covenant & Conversation Family Editions, these ‘Ceremony & Celebration: Family Editions distill some of the key ideas from the teachings of Rabbi Sacks zt”l around the chaggim, making them engaging for older children and teenagers, and encouraging further discussion around your Yom Tov table.

You can also watch an introductory video about the project and learn more about its pedagogic construction.

You are very welcome to email us on [email protected] with your feedback – we’re always happy to hear from you!

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Adapted from the introduction to the Koren Rosh Hashanah Machzor with commentary and translation by Rabbi Sacks

The genius of Judaism was to take eternal truths and translate them into time, into lived experiences. Other cultures have constructed philosophies and theologies, elaborate systems of abstract thought. Judaism prefers truth lived to truth merely thought. Ancient Greece produced the logical imagination. Judaism produced the chronological imagination, truth transposed into the calendar.

Rosh Hashanah, the anniversary of the creation of humanity, invites us to live and feel the human condition in graphic ways.

Here are 10 messages from Rosh Hashanah that speak directly to our lives today.

1. Life is Short

However much life expectancy has risen, we will not, in one lifetime, be able to achieve everything we might wish to achieve. This life is all we have. How shall we use it well? We know that we will not finish the task, but neither are we free to stand aside from it.

2. Life is a Gift from God

Life itself, each day, every breath we take, is the gift of God. Life is not something we may take for granted. If we do, we will fail to celebrate it. God gives us one gift above all others, said Rambam (Maimonides): life itself, beside which everything else is secondary. Other religions have sought God in heaven, or in the afterlife, the distant past or the distant future. Here there is suffering, there reward; here chaos, there order; here pain, there balm; here poverty, there plenty. Judaism has relentlessly sought God in the here-and-now of life on earth. Yes, we believe in life after death, but it is in life before death that we truly find human greatness.

3. We are Free

Judaism is the religion of the free human being freely responding to the God of freedom. We are not in the grip of sin. We are not determined by economic forces or psychological drives or genetically encoded impulses that we are powerless to resist. The very fact that we can do teshuvah, that we can act differently tomorrow than we did yesterday, tells us we are free. Philosophers have found this idea difficult. So have scientists. But Judaism insists on it, and our ancestors proved it by defying every law of history, surviving against the odds, refusing to accept defeat.

4. Life is Meaningful

We are not mere accidents of matter, generated by a universe that came into being for no reason and will one day, for no reason, cease to be. We are here because a loving God brought the universe, and life, and us, into existence – a God who knows our fears, hears our prayers, believes in us more than we believe in ourselves, forgives us when we fail, lifts us when we fall and gives us the strength to overcome despair. The historian Paul Johnson once wrote: “No people has ever insisted more firmly than the Jews that history has a purpose and humanity a destiny.” He concluded: “The Jews, therefore, stand right at the centre of the perennial attempt to give human life the dignity of a purpose.” This is one of the truths of Rosh Hashanah.

5. Life is Not Easy

Judaism does not see the world through rose-tinted lenses. The sufferings of our ancestors haunt our prayers. The world we live in is not the world as it ought to be. That is why, despite every temptation, Judaism has never been able to say the Messianic Age has come, even though we await it daily. But we are not bereft of hope because we are not alone. When Jews went into exile, the Shechinah, the Divine presence, went with them. God is always there, “close to all who call on Him in truth” (Tehillim 145:18). He may hide His face, but He is there. He may be silent, but He is listening to us, hearing us and healing us in ways we may not understand at the time but which become clear in retrospect.

6. Life is Still Sweet

Life may be hard, but it can still be sweet, the way the challah and the apple are on Rosh Hashanah when we dip them in honey. Jews have never needed wealth to be rich, or power to be strong. To be a Jew is to live for simple things: the love between husband and wife, the sacred bond between parents and children, the gift of community where we help others and others help us and where we learn that joy is doubled and grief halved by being shared. To be a Jew is to give, whether in the form of tzedakah or gemilut chasadim (acts of loving-kindness). It is to learn and never stop seeking, to pray and never stop thanking, to do teshuvah and never stop growing. In this lies the secret of joy. Throughout history there have been hedonistic cultures that worship pleasure and ascetic cultures that deny it, but Judaism has a different approach altogether: to sanctify pleasure by making it part of the worship of God. Life is sweet when touched by the Divine.

Life may be hard, but it can still be sweet, the way the challah and the apple are on Rosh Hashanah when we dip them in honey.

7. Our Life is a Work of Art

Our life is the single greatest work of art we will ever make. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, in one of his earliest works, spoke about Ish Hahalachah, the halachic personality and its longing to create, to make something new, original. God too longs for us to create and thereby become His partner in the work of renewal. “The most fundamental principle of all is that man must create himself.” That is what teshuvah is, an act of making ourselves anew. On Rosh Hashanah we step back from our life like an artist stepping back from their canvas, seeing what needs changing for the painting to be complete.

8. We Are What We Are Because of Those Who Came Before Us

Our lives are not disconnected particles. We are each a letter in God’s Book of Life. But single letters, though they are the vehicles of meaning, have no meaning when they stand alone. To have meaning they must be joined to other letters to make words, sentences, paragraphs, a story, and to be a Jew is to be part of the strangest, oldest, most unexpected and counterintuitive story there has ever been: the story of a tiny people, never large and often homeless, who nonetheless outlived the greatest empires the world has ever known – the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans, the medieval empires of Christianity and Islam, all the way to the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. Each in turn thought itself immortal. Each has gone. The Jewish people still lives. But we do not start with nothing. We have inherited wealth, not material but spiritual. We are heirs to our ancestors’ greatness.

9. Judaism Asks Great Things of Us and by Doing So Makes Us Great.

We walk as tall as the ideals for which we live, and those of the Torah are very high indeed. We are, said Moshe, God’s children (Devarim 14:1). We are called on, said the prophet Yishayahu, to be "His witnesses, His ambassadors on Earth," (Yishayahu 43:10).

Time and again Jews did things thought impossible. They battled against might in the name of right. They fought against slavery. They showed that it was possible to be a nation without a land, to have influence without power, to be branded the world’s pariahs yet not lose self-respect. They believed with unshakeable conviction that they would one day return to their land, and though the hope seemed absurd, it happened.

Judaism sets the bar high, and though we may fall short time and again, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur allow us to begin anew, forgiven, cleansed, undaunted, ready for the next challenge, the next year.

10. We are Dust of the Earth but within us is the Breath of God

And finally comes the sound of the shofar, piercing our defences, a wordless cry in a religion of words, a sound produced by breath as if to tell us that that is all life is – a mere breath – yet breath is nothing less than the spirit of God within us: “Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being” (Bereishit 2:7).

And whether the shofar is our cry to God or God’s cry to us, somehow in that tekiah, shevarim, teruah – the call, the sob, the wail – is all the emotion of the Divine–human encounter as God asks us to take His gift, life itself, and make of it something holy, by so acting as to honour God and His image on earth, humankind.

For we defeat death, not by living forever but by living by values that live forever; by doing deeds and creating blessings that will live on after us, and by attaching ourselves in the midst of time to God who lives beyond time, “the King – the living, everlasting God.”

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Tefillah text and commentary taken from the Koren Sacks Rosh Hashanah Machzor

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No prayer more powerfully defines the image of the Days of Awe than does Unetaneh Tokef. The language is simple, the imagery strong, the rhythms insistent and the drama intense.

We do not know exactly who composed Unetaneh Tokef or when. A famous tradition dates it to the time when Jews in northern Europe were suffering brutal Christian persecution. It tells of Rabbi Amnon of Mainz, how he was pressured by the bishop, who was also mayor of the town, to convert. Eventually, after repeated prevarication, the bishop subjected him to cruel punishment, inflicting on him wounds from which he would die. On Rosh Hashanah, sensing that he was on the verge of death, Rabbi Amnon asked to be carried to the synagogue. As he entered he found the congregation about to say the Kedusha, and asked for permission to say a prayer as his dying words. He then said Unetaneh Tokef, and died (Or Zarua 2:276).

The discovery of ancient manuscripts in the Cairo Geniza suggests, however, that the prayer may be older than this. This and other factors suggest that, in its original form, it was composed in Israel several centuries before.

Analysis

It is structured in four movements.

The first sets the scene. The heavenly court is assembled. God sits in the seat of judgment. The angels tremble. Before Him is the book of all our deeds. In it our lives are written, bearing our signature, and we await the verdict.

The second defines what is at stake: Who will live, who will die? Who will flourish, who will suffer, who will be at ease, who will be in torment? Between now and Yom Kippur our fate is being decided on high.

The third is the great outburst of faith that defines Judaism as a religion of hope. No fate is final. Repentance, prayer and charity can avert the evil decree. Life is not a script written by Aeschylus or Sophocles in which tragedy is inexorable. God forgives; God pardons; God exercises clemency – if we truly repent and pray and give to others.

The fourth is a moving reflection on the fragility of human life and the eternity of God. We are no more than a fragment of pottery, a blade of grass, a flower that fades, a shadow, a cloud, a breath of wind. Dust we are and to dust we return. But God is life forever.

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Find all Ceremony & Celebration: Family Editions here.