Happy New Year!
It’s Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. A Happy New Year to all who celebrate the holiday!
Rosh Hashanah customs include sounding the shofar (a cleaned-out ram’s horn), as prescribed in the Torah, following the prescription of the Hebrew Bible to “raise a noise” on Yom Teruah. Its rabbinical customs include attending synagogue services and reciting special liturgy about teshuva, as well as enjoying festive meals. Eating symbolic foods is now a tradition, such as apples dipped in honey, hoping to evoke a sweet new year.
So, it’s not really a deeply serious “holy day” so much as a religiously marked festival day?
Trying to think of a Christian parallel. Not coming up with anything at the moment.
DNW:
It actually is a very serious (although happy) holiday. It is one of the High Holy Days on which even Jews who are not especially religious and do not attend synagogue with any regularity do attend. It marks the beginning of the ten Days of Awe, the most solemn of all Jewish holidays, ending with the Day of Atonement which is Yom Kippur.
DNW
How about Christmas?
Today listening to the holiday greetings from the IDF I learned the accent is placed on the last syllable, thus: Shana Tova
https://mobile.twitter.com/IDF/status/1178307159530115077
L’Shana Tovah, for a Good Year to all. 😀
Happy New Year!
If Neo’s description is current and accurate, then Christmas as our post-Christian secular culture presently recognizes it, might be something of an analogue.
Thanksgiving is a kind of socio-political holiday which many people take very seriously at the same time, because as non-specific as it is, it resonates deeply of family and home … as well as harvest … a seasonal and yearly milestone.
So, maybe that … sort of.
So what year is it?
And what happened in year one to mark it as the beginning?
Have a sweet 5780 everyone. I believe that the story goes, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
“what year”?
Rolling into 5780, I think
I saw this joke on a Jewish website, so don’t go all SJW Cultural Appropriation on me, okay?
Q: How’s your New Year going?
A: Shofar, sho good.
DNW: The Chocolate Bunny and Egg Holiday also has high holy religious significance for Christians, but most everybody else (including most Christians) treats it as a festival.
C. S. Lewis (who else?) addresses the duality in one of his essays.
C.S. Lewis, “’The Fair Beauty of the Lord,’” Reflections on the Psalms (1958)
I’m all for everybody celebrating any happy day with anybody, anytime.
Seems there is a more specific answer to the question: what began on Rosh Hashanah?
According to torah.org, the Talmud says Adam and Eve were created on the first of Tishrei, so Rosh Hashanah is like a birthday of the human race.
Which feels like a very nice parallel to Christmas for Christians.
So I grabbed a scrap of paper and doing a little subtraction came up with 3,761 – depending on your method of counting years you may get one less.
I typed in 3760 BC, and Lo and behold wiki and Haaretz and many others are just willing, waiting and wanting to provide me with the relevant information.
I was trying to figure out if there were some widely known archeologically demonstrated event traceable to that proximate date, but it turns out some rabbi came up with the date much the same way Bishop Usher calculated the age of the world.
Newgrange is newer, Catal Huyuk, ends about that time, Gobekli Tepe was buried long before.
What was the world like during that long forgotten but long lasting age of polished stone and copper and proto urban life?
Amazing how much has come to light since we were junior high students avidly reading 1960/70s paperback versions of Stuart Piggott’s works on prehistory.
How long was the European neolithic thought by prewar scholarship to have lasted, 500 -1500 years?
Esther,
Interesting you should say that. Long ago I decided that even we atheists might very happily accept each Christmas as Mankind’s birthday party.
May you and yours have a happy New Year. :>))
.
Aesop,
Q: How’s your New Year going?
A: Shofar, sho good.
This is too good for even the { “Ee-e-ew-w”, Holds Nose } with which the best puns are to be received! LOLOLOL
.Cultural appropriation … So don’t Christian rams have horns? :>))!!
Thanks, Esther. Dov Fischer, who is an orthodox rabbi, said over at The American Spectator that Jewish tradition sees Rosh Hashanah as the birthday of the world, including, of course, gentiles. So, to my Jewish friends, may you have a good year, and the same to us all. And may those observing these Days of Awe find your names written in the book of life.
“What was the world like during that long forgotten but long lasting age of polished stone and copper and proto urban life?” – DNW
I highly recommend “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus” by American author and science writer Charles C. Mann, which I am reading currently, when not spending time correcting people on the internet*.
BTW, FWIW, IMO, AFAICT, and maybe a couple more, I believe in the Old Earth (and thus the Old Peoples) because the evidence for both is far too copious and incontestable (and not incompatible with Intelligent Design), but “Adam and Eve” could have been the first humans to knowingly accept G-d’s commission to “found” a spiritual “human race” that was willing to acknowledge, and abide by, His sovereignty.
The Older Guys were groping in the dark for deity, as it were.
*
https://www.xkcd.com/386/
AesopFan, that interpretation of Adam and Eve is held by quite a number of Christian theologians and scriptural experts. I am not familiar enough with Talmudic and rabbinic teachings to know if it is there, also.
Hmm.
Always worth learning about the origins of such things.
But I think I’ll keep it simple: Happy (belated) Rosh Hashanah to all!
BTW, the word “all” includes those who don’t celebrate it, myself included. After all, why not have a happy day?
(Although, I admit, there are other points-of-view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjeN1WIAXFc )
Kate – nice to know I’m in good company! I haven’t actually read any of those experts, or don’t remember doing so, although I could have been influenced by something I don’t now recall reading.
Do you have a couple of suggestions for perusal?
I am sure you are a very nice and kind lady.
Which may be why you might think it is strange I’m bringing this up.
http://www.anft.net/f-14/f14-squadron-vf143.htm
“…One popular version is that when the Griffin design was unveiled, a female observer commented that the creature’s droopy head and gaping mouth made it looked like a dog throwing up. A few claimed the nickname originated in Vietnam when a USAF F-105 pilot remarked on how the beast resembled a vomitting canine! Either way, the legend of the World Famous Pukin’ Dogs had begun…”
Not even my squadron, my lady. I belonged to the Sundowners. VF-111. Although we got the reputation as the Splashdowners as we kept crashing our aircraft.
http://www.flying-tigers.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/su1-F-14A-Tomcat-VF-111-Sundowners-Miss-Molly-960×544.jpg
Please note. We painted the shark mouth on the drop tanks.
We were nothing if not thorough. We only lost the Tomcat follies to VF-2 because they rented a tank and crushed our Sedan De Ville.
You can’t plan for everything.
Fighter Squadron 111 lives on. Just not as an Tomcat squadron.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/8282/how-to-fight-to-win-in-the-f-14-a-4-and-f-5-at-the-navys-topgun-school
It lives on as a Navy aggressor squadron out of Key West.
https://www.bing.com/search?q=vfc+111+sundowners+squadron&form=EDNTHT&mkt=en-us&httpsmsn=1&plvar=0&refig=0a46a4b65175411cb04ce02f5e48791c&sp=1&qs=HS&pq=vfc+&sk=PRES1&sc=8-4&cvid=0a46a4b65175411cb04ce02f5e48791c&cc=US&setlang=en-US
Or it did when I retired back in 2008.
https://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/supporting-the-f-5-aggressor-fleet-05050/
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b3/09/22/b309223e5cbb1bfbab5cdaac69235653.jpg
Happy New Year. I thought I should edit my comment to make it more appropriate.
I hope you outlive me. It would be nice. But maybe you don’t see things the same ways I do.
USS Savannah. This should have been a fatal hit.
http://ww2today.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/USS_Savannah_CL-42_is_hit_by_a_German_guided_bomb_off_Salerno_11_September_1943.jpg
My Uncle Tony served in the Med during WWII. My dad in the Pacific.
What should have been a fatal hit wasn’t. Because we in the USN pride ourselves at damage control. We can bring ships back that would be lost to any other navy.