Rosh Hashanah: A Cosmic Accounting — For Jews Only, or All Creation?
To the Editor,
My eyes flutter open in a haze, and before I can wipe away the sleep, the sky over the harbor is doing something I don’t have words for yet — burnt orange transcending into luminous rose over the TD Garden, over the highway curling below where the first commuters are already stacking up toward the tunnel, headlights on, no idea how the morning began. Somewhere in that half-second between sleep and seeing, I think: is this You — Hashem — talking to me?
Eyes wide open! I sit up, reciting Modeh Ani — the first words a Jew says on waking, thank you for giving me my life back — before I’ve even fully landed in my body. And then it hits me — SMACK — the way these things do: this is what a shofar blast would look like if sound turned into color instead of noise. The tekiah sound stretched across a whole sky instead of a single breath. Below it, an ordinary morning continues to unfold without concern for accolades. .Nobody down on the asphalt is looking up. The rhythm of the morning curates its own unveiling.
A few minutes and the haze rolls in, erasing the whole palette, as if I imagined the encounter. My photograph — I took one — pales on reflection. This is HaMelech baSadeh, they say, the King is in the field: in the Jewish month of Elul, the King doesn’t wait in the palace for an appointment, The Devine comes out to where you already are, unannounced. And I was caught off guard, unable to form words.
Here’s the part I keep sitting with. In three days, the Jewish calendar marks Rosh Hashanah — the anniversary of creation itself. Not the anniversary of the Jewish people; of the world. Pause right there – yes the world. Every creature, every tree, every commuter on the highway below my highrise view. Jewish practice keeps the date, to build a whole liturgy and calendar around noticing it — the way someone in a family ends up being the one who remembers everyone’s birthday. But the accounting itself, tradition holds, belongs to all of creation. On Rosh Hashanah, all of creation stands in judgment together — not Jews alone. It’s a cosmic event with a two-day placeholder pinned on the calendar. The whole world is invited whether or not it knows the invitation exists.
Yesterday was the 25th of Elul — Jewish tradition holds this as the day creation began, the first of the six days, and then Shabbat, a day of rest, the first indication that time itself shapes a calendar.
Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki) lived 1040–1105, a Jewish sage commenting on Genesis 1:4, teaches — drawing on the Talmud in Chagigah 12a — Rashi teaches that this first light was set apart and hidden — not lost, reserved — for the righteous, because the world as it was could not yet be trusted with it.
Which is maybe an accurate place to land given the world affairs, three days before the whole world — not just the Jewish part of it — comes up for its annual review. Did I prepare enough ? Am I ready? Will my actions help tip the scale for a good sealing ? I don’t have those answers yet. I have a glimmer of radiant, jaw dropping light appearing through a sunrise . I am left with some humble trembling as the days of accounting approach.
My blessing for the New Year is simple: that this coming year be one of kindness, of compassion, of unity across whatever divides us. Everything, after all, comes from the same Source no matter where our journey takes us. Shana Tova.
Phoebe Wing Swan
Boston-based photographer, collage artist, and local nature chronicler behind
the blog River Echoes