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.
