It’s fall again, and I’m thinking about beginnings. Not only are the leaves changing color, and kids going back to school. Not only am I a rabbi, very tuned in to the Jewish calendar, just on the tail end of celebrating the busiest Jewish month, which just so happens to start with the Jewish New Year. Not only did I just move to East Meadow at the end of June. But I’m also still celebrating the birth of my son in August.
At the end of June I moved, and that was a beginning. Then I started a new job, had a baby, school started up, and there was Rosh Hashana. How many beginnings can one person have in three months?
Within the Jewish calendar itself there is, for a rabbi, a seemingly never-ending season of beginnings. The Jewish month of Tishrei starts with Rosh Hashana. But unlike the secular New Year, which is over and done with in a day, Rosh Hashana only kickstarts the Ten Days of Repentance, where we are encouraged to do tikkun, repair, and teshuva, return, for the mistakes we’ve made over the last year. All of this culminates in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
So that’s the end of the New Year, right? No. Just five days later, the harvest festival of Sukkot begins, and with it we are reminded of the rabbinic adage that if the Book of Life is written on Rosh Hashana and sealed on Yom Kippur, it isn’t sent out to be fulfilled until the end of Sukkot. So we have even more time to think about beginnings, a whole seven-day festival to reflect and ask how we want to begin again, to improve.
So that’s the end, right? Finally, 21 days into the month of Tishrei, the New Year’s season is over? Not yet. There’s one more holiday immediately following Sukkot: Shimeni Atzeret, the eighth day of gathering, a mysterious final celebration prescribed in the Torah that has since become Simchat Torah, the rejoicing of the Torah. On the 23rd of Tishrei — or the 22nd in many Reform congregations and in the land of Israel — the annual cycle of reading the Torah is completed and instantly started over. We go from the end of Deuteronomy to the beginning of Genesis. Another start. Another beginning.
That, by my count, is no fewer than four separate beginnings over 23 days. And as a rabbi, at the end of this busy season, I always ask myself, why do we Jews do this to ourselves? Why do we stuff all of these holidays together, especially all of these holidays about beginnings? Wasn’t once enough?
But that’s just the post-holiday fatigue talking. I do believe there is a lesson to be learned from the Jewish holiday season. We often talk about beginnings as if they are set occasions, or can only happen every so often. We say things like, “We’ll have a chance to change the next quarter/the next year/when I start a new job/when we have our next kid,” and so on. We make New Year’s resolutions once a year, then feel guilty when we almost inevitably fail to follow through.
But here’s the secret: we don’t have to wait. Not for the next quarter, or the next year, or the next opportunity. We have the ability to turn over a new leaf any time we want. The Jewish calendar, with all its beginnings, invites us to imagine our own beginnings. If we can have four beginnings in a month, why not another beginning five weeks from now? Two months from now? We don’t have to wait for Rosh Hashana to start doing teshuva and thinking of how to improve. We can do it whenever we want.
Set beginnings remind us to refresh, review and restart. But we don’t only need to rely on those set beginnings. This fall, in the season of so many beginnings, ask yourself: When will my next beginning be? And what more will I do after this next beginning?
Rabbi Samuel Gelman is the spiritual leader of East Meadow Beth El Jewish Center.
