Rosh Hashanah

On Rosh Hashanah, our judgment is written; on Yom Kippur, it is sealed; and on Hoshana Rabbah, it is sent out to be fulfilled. It is said that on the night of Hoshana Rabbah, those judged to die that year will lose their shadows. Sefer Chasidim relates that, in a final plea for forgiveness, even the spirits of the dead rise from their graves to pray for the living.

What is the ideal relationship between Jews and the rest of humanity? A study of Ultra-Orthodox, Modern Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform High Holiday prayer books shows how each read the three uvechen “and so” additions to the amidah depending on their ideological worldviews. Perhaps there is wisdom in the prayer’s ambiguity.

Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine equate kingship with tyranny and corruption. How can we who embrace modern democracy relate to Rosh Hashanah’s focus on God’s enthronement as King?

The history, structure, poetic style, and intertextual biblical and rabbinic sources that inspired the best-known liturgical piyyut recited on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Israel’s deity becomes a universal God and the political power behind human affairs. This is just one of seven historical shifts in how the Bible conceives of “theocracy,” divine political power.

The new year and Akitu festivals in Babylonia were celebrated in the spring, during which the high priest of Marduk’s Esagil temple would read the Babylonian creation story, Enuma Elish. This narrative tells how the young god Marduk became king of the gods by saving them from Tiamat and her army of monsters.

The New Year was celebrated on the festival of ingathering of grapes, accompanied by a sacrificial meal and wine. YHWH was declared to be Israel’s king and judge, and his presence, as it was manifest in the ark, was paraded before the Israelites by the king.

The haftarah (prophetic reading) for the first day of Rosh Hashanah features Channah's two prayers. In the second prayer, she thanks God for the birth of Samuel by reciting a ready made royal hymn about defeating one's enemies, hardly relevant to her situation. Why does the Bible choose such a prayer and how might this help us better understand prayer in the context of the contemporary Rosh Hashanah?

The missing links

The Hebrew calendar marks multiple news year’s days to express different values: nature and history, universal and particular.

Do we really want God to remember all that we did?

Battle, creation, enthronement, and justice

God creates “the human... male and female” (Genesis 1), which we typically understand to mean the first human couple. However, a look at the creation of other species in the same chapter suggests otherwise.

Several biblical passages imply that God was ritually enthroned as king during the new year celebrations. In the Torah itself, however, this is suppressed. God as king appears only in three ancient poetic passages, never in the Torah’s prose or laws, including in its description of Rosh Hashanah.