Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, begins at sundown on Monday evening, marking the start of the year 5786.
Jews around the world will refrain from work, attend synagogue services, and eat festive meals. The mood of the holiday is joyous, but also reflective, as Rosh Hashanah is a time of repentance as well as celebration.
The central mitzvah, or commandment, of the holiday, is to listen to the sound of a shofar, or ram’s horn, being blown. The sound is a call to repentance; the root of the word “shofar” is the same as the root of the verb “to repair oneself.”
Traditional foods include apples dipped in honey, for a sweet New Year; pomegranates, for a year as full of good deeds as the pomegranate has seeds; and even a mystery fruit eaten on the second night of the holiday, to differentiate it from the first. Some Jewish communities have the custom of eating an elaborate series of fruits and other foods to mark the New Year.
The holiday lasts for two days, owing to a tradition dating back thousands of years. The Jewish calendar is both solar and lunar, with new months marked by new moons. According to customs, witnesses would have to sight the new moon, and their testimony would have to be verified in Jerusalem. Because that process could take most of the day, that could leave little time for the New Year services on the first day of the New Year. Hence a second day was added to allow for the services to be performed in their entirety.
Israeli Prime Minsiter Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement with a special wish for the New Year: “May we bring home this year, soon, all our hostages. And may it be a year in which we further strengthen the indomitable Jewish spirit and expand the circle of peace.”
From Jerusalem, the undivided eternal capital of the Jewish people, I send to every Jewish home in the world the blessings of a Happy New Year.
The traditional Hebrew greeting is “Shanah Tovah,” or “A Good Year.” In Yiddish, “Gut Yontev” (“Happy Holiday”) may also be said.
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 Zionist Conspiracy Wants You, now available on Amazon. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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