The Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashana, literally “Head of the Year,” begins Friday at sundown and ends Sunday at nightfall. The year will be 5784 on the Jewish calendar, which counts the years since the Biblical creation.
The reason Rosh Hashanah is two days long is that under the traditional method of determining the start of the year, through the testimony of witnesses who observed the new moon, the holiday might not be declared until the first day had almost elapsed, leaving no time for the rituals of the day. Hence the holiday is observed on two days, both inside Israel and in the Diaspora (where other holidays are typically celebrated for an additional day).
The day is a joyous occasion. But it is also a solemn one. Rosh Hashanah is also known as the Day of Judgment and the Day of Remembrance, and it is thought to be the day on which God judges every creature in the universe. He reviews the good and bad deeds of each, and decides the fate of each, inscribing the names of those found worthy in the Book of Life. Thus, in addition to traditional greetings such as “Shanah tovah u’metukah,” meaning “Happy and sweet new year,” Jews will often add: “tikateivu v’tichateimu,” meaning “may you be incscribed and sealed.”
Both days are celebrated with many of the same prayers and rituals, though there are slight differences in the liturgy. On the first day, the story of the birth of Isaac is read from the Torah, and the story of the birth of Samuel is read from the Book of Samuel: both have a common theme, in that a woman’s prayers for children were answered. On the second day, the story of the binding of Isaac is read from the Torah, and a selection of the book of Jeremiah is read that deals with the eventual return of the Jewish people from exile, once their sins have been forgiven.
On each day, one hundred blasts from the shofar — typically, a ram or kudu horn — are heard. The sound is a call to repentance; the Hebrew word “shofar” shares a root with the word “l’hishtaper,” meaning “to improve oneself.”
This year, the shofar will not be sounded on the first day, which coincides with the Jewish Sabbath; Jewish law forbids sounding the shofar on the Sabbath for fear that people will carry it to the synagogue, violating the Sabbath.
Likewise, the traditional practice of Tashlich, in which people throw bread crumbs symbolizing their sins into a body of water (preferably one with living fish), is postponed to the second day, when carrying will be permitted.
Traditional Rosh Hashanah foods include apples dipped in honey, and pomegranates, whose seeds are said to approximate the number of commandments in the Torah (613). (I often count: it is usually between 500 and 700).
On the second night of Rosh Hashanah, it is customary to eat a new fruit, or one that you have not eaten in a long time, so you can repeat the traditional blessing from the first night, thanking God for surviving to this season.
One food that is generally avoided is nuts: the Hebrew word for “nuts” has a numerical value equivalent to the word for “sin,” derived from the custom of gematria, which assigns numerical values to each particular Hebrew letter.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.