Profile Rabbi Dovid E. Eidensohn

Showing posts with label The strange day of Rosh HaShana not in Nissan the beginning of the Jewish year. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The strange day of Rosh HaShana not in Nissan the beginning of the Jewish year. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 15, 2018

Torah Holidays - Nissan and Tishrei


Torah Holidays
By Rabbi Dovid E. Eidensohn
The months of the year have special holidays and special months. The Jewish calendar begins in the spring month of Nisan and ends with the winter month of Adar. The greatest group of holy holidays and holy days is in Tishrei in the summer, which follows the holy month of Elul. Tishrei begins with Rosh HaShana, the New Year, which ten days later is Yom Kippur the fast day of penitence, and a few days later Succose, the festival of the Tent, when people leave their homes and eat and sleep in Succose. In climates very cold few people sleep in the Succah, but do eat in the Succah. The eighth day of Succose is a new holiday called Shemini Atseres, which means the holiday of the eight day, the eighth day of Succose.
Strangely, the first Jewish month, which is Nissan, although it has the important holiday of Pesach, or Passover, is completely outclassed by Tishrei. It would seem that by rights Nissan should be the beginning of the Jewish year, and the senior candidate to be Rosh HaShana, the New Year. Instead, Rosh HaShana is seven months later, the first day of Tishrei. That day is the big holiday of the year, with the blowing of the Shofar, and great efforts to make it the pure and holy holiday that determines the future of the year.
Another strange thing about Nissan and Tishrei is that Nissan is the beginning of the Jewish year, and Rosh HaShana the gentile or general year. But the gentile year is the day of the greatest and holiest celebration, the blowing of the Shofar, the reading of the Torah, and holiday dress, and the first day of Nissan is not a major holiday at all.
But on Nissan the Jews left Egypt, not with a Torah that had not yet been given by HaShem and Moses to the Jews, but as a people who were slaves and now going to the Holy Land of Israel, but not yet there. On the first day of Nissan the Jews were still in Egypt with only a few Torah commands. Two weeks later the Jews were commanded to sacrifice the Paschal lamb, and about the sin of eating bread and the mitsvah of eating matsose. But Nissan was not the great day of celebration. It was rather a beginning, a very small beginning, of the year, which concluded in Tishrei, which was essentially a Rosh HaShana for the gentiles, not the Jews. There is an important Torah teaching in this strange situation. The Jewish people are “the smallest of the nations” but their task is to bring Torah and goodness to the entire world, to all of the gentiles. For this reason, the key holiday is not Nissan but Tishrei, because only in Tishrei have the Jews advanced to the level of receiving the Torah and the Ten Commandments at Sinai and merited to hear HaShem speaking to them. Nissan is special because it is “light from darkness,” Jewish slaves to Egypt who escape with miracles to go to Sinai and eventually receive there the Torah. Perhaps nothing is so crucial to Israel as the mitsvah of teaching the entire world about HaShem and Torah. And the culmination of this command is on the gentile holiday of Rosh HaShana, the New Year, a New Year, not for Jews whose New Year is Nissan, but for the Jews who fulfill their task of teaching Torah to the world.