In the summer of 1776, the Continental Congress handed Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson an important assignment: design a seal for a country that did not yet exist. Franklin proposed using the image of Moses standing at the shore of the Red Sea, his rod extended, Pharaoh’s army drowning behind him. Jefferson proposed the children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Neither man was known for his piety, yet both reached instinctively for the same story: the Exodus.
They were not unusual. A century later, slaves in the American South sang about Moses going down to Egypt to tell Pharaoh to let my people go, and they called Harriet Tubman by Moses’ name. Across the centuries, people who knew almost nothing about the Jewish people knew the Exodus and claimed it as their own.
But the Exodus gave the world more than a story of liberation. It gave the people of Israel a calendar. While the Israelites were still slaves, before the final plague and before the sea split, God gave them their first commandment as a nation, and it had nothing to do with faith or morality. He told them how to count time.
The month God is speaking about is Nisan, the Hebrew month of spring, which falls every year in March or April. Two weeks after this commandment was given, Israel walked out of Egypt, and Jews have celebrated Passover in the middle of Nisan ever since. The verse could not be clearer: The Jewish year begins in the Spring, with the redemption from Egypt.
Which makes what Jews actually do every year very strange. Six months later, in September or October, on the first day of the Hebrew month of Tishrei, Jews around the world fill synagogues for Rosh Hashanah, a name that means “the head of the year.” We hear the blast of the shofar, the ram’s horn. We dip apples in honey and bless one another with a good and sweet year ahead, and we pray for health, for our children, for another year of life. In every practical sense, this is the Jewish new year.
Why do the Jewish people have two new years, six months apart?
Rabbi Yehuda Léon Ashkenazi explains that the answer begins with the creation of the world.
Before God created anything, there was only God. But for a world to exist at all, something had to be other than God. The moment God brought that otherness into being, a gap opened – a distance between Creator and creation. Distance did not happen to the creation later, after Adam sinned. Distance is the price of creation.
God did this deliberately, and He did it for our sake. He wanted human beings who would choose Him. A man standing in front of the open, overwhelming presence of God would have no choice but to serve Him; he would see the truth and be compelled to live in accordance with God’s will. So God hid Himself. He built a world of free will, where the sun comes up whether or not anyone prays, where wicked men get rich and good men bury their children. Only in a world like that can a person freely turn toward God.
Deep down, every one of us feels the terrible pain of this distance. We yearn for God, but struggle to find Him. This is not a personal failing. Distance is the price of creation, of our existence, of free will.
But God did not set the world at a distance and then walk away from it. From the beginning He has called His creatures back to Him, as the prophet Malachi so powerfully said:
This is the drama of human history. Every generation of mankind has tried to answer that call. Men build temples and altars, invent religions, and cross oceans looking for holiness, all of it to close the gap that opened when the world was made. The Hebrew word for the offerings brought in the Temple is korban, from the root karov, which means “close.” When Jews and gentiles brought offerings in the Temple in Jerusalem, it was an attempt to draw close to God, to narrow the gap between Creator and creation.
The Jewish new year that we celebrate each autumn is called Rosh Hashanah, and it falls on the first of Tishrei, the day God created the world. On Rosh Hashanah we remember that we are creations, standing apart from God.
Ten days later comes Yom Kippur, the day of teshuvah, when we “return” to God. Whatever we have done, however far we have fallen away from God, we can turn around and come back. We are not condemned to lives of distance and emptiness.
Yom Kippur is a promise. It teaches us that it is possible to come home, to erase the distance between us and God. But in Nisan, through the miracle of the Exodus, it actually happened. An entire nation broke free from slavery in a foreign land and began the journey home to the land of Israel.
This is why the Jewish people have two new years. The first, Rosh Hashanah, is the new year of separation, marking the day God created the world and set us apart from Him. The second, the first of Nisan, is the new year of redemption, marking the month God reached into Egypt and began bringing us back to Him. Passover is the fixing of Rosh Hashanah.
This is why the nations of the world are so deeply moved by Passover and the Exodus. The Exodus was not only the redemption of Israel. It showed all of humanity that we are not condemned to slavery, that we are not sentenced to live our lives at a distance from God, and that there is a way back to Him.
Rosh Hashanah, which we will celebrate soon, marks the day God set the world far from Himself, the beginning of the foundational pain of humanity, Yet Jewish families rejoice on Rosh Hashanah. After services, we enjoy a celebratory lunch. We dip challah in honey, bless one another with a sweet year, and celebrate. Why?
Because God created this world already knowing how the story ends. He did not build a world, watch it drift away from Him, and centuries later decide to do something about it. The Sages teach that the redemption of Israel was in God’s mind before He created anything at all. He made the world at a distance, and He made it with the way home already prepared.
The honey on the Rosh Hashanah table is not wishful thinking. It is a statement about the way God built the world. He created us at a distance from Himself, but He never intended us to stay there. He is bringing us home.
