Saturday, September 19, 2009

It’s Jewish New Year or Rosh HaShanah.

There are so many things to say about this holiday but I will only get into a few things. First of all it is strange that “New Year” is celebrated on the first day of the seventh month. This makes sense only if we remember that “our ways are not God’s ways and that our thoughts is not God’s thoughts.”
We need to be released from our way of understanding “time” which is controlled by the sun and the moon, day and night, the seasons of the year. If we try to relate to time not as a straight line but rather as a circle where the “beginning and the end” meets up it may start to make more sense.

God created the world in six days and He made the seventh day a day of rest. This number seven has ever since become a symbol of “the beginning of a new spiritual season”. (Just check this with Leviticus 23 and pay attention to how many times the number 7 is mentioned.)

So the Jewish New Year starts on the first day of the seventh month. (…a month which contains some other major holidays as well; Yom Kippur and Succot/ Feast of Tabernacles) One other name for the holiday is “the feast of the blowing of the shofar”. A shofar is a ram’s horn and it resembles the ram which was caught by it’s horns and which was used as a sacrifice instead of Isaac. The story from Genesis : 22about Abraham ‘s willingness to sacrifice Isaac on God’s command is read in the synagogues.--When Isaac asks about the sacrifice Abraham replies that God will provide for Himself the lamb for the burnt offering. The ram was not a lamb and it belongs to the goat family and not to the sheep family.
If we add to the story that Isaac was in his thirties when this happened, that he had to carry the woods for the sacrifice on his own back, that the blowing of the ram’s horn symbolizes “God as King of Kings and Lord of Lords” and that the word ram in Hebrew actually is from the same root of words as God it may cause our understanding of the story to grow in a prophetic sense.

Elin Elkouby

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