This Rosh Hashanah is not like the ones that preceded it. In Italy, we went through a difficult winter that we were not expecting. In Israel, too, the situation isn't easy. We saw the words of the poem "Let us cede power" come to life. "And who by plague… ." Personally, at the start of winter, I was a different person, and now I'm someone else. What we went through in the months of the disaster is seared into our consciousness. A disaster like this must not pass over us as a technical matter, an annoying virus that we have to wait out. It's important to learn a lesson by which to live, on the national and international levels, on the professional and personal levels.
A new year doesn't start from zero, it is added to the years that came before. A new start does not erase all that came before. Even if we didn't get to where we wanted, we must not despair. What appears to be a failure will create some kind of change. The effort we invested have left an imprint on reality; deep below, processes are taking place that are different from what they appear to be on the surface. What we did not accomplish, we will in the coming year. Patience.
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When we were born, the moment we emerged from our mother's womb, we cried out loudly. On Rosh Hashanah – the "day the world was born" – a new year is born, and we along with it, amazed at the secret of life renewing itself. The focal point of the holiday is the shofar blast, and what is that, if not a recreation of a newborn's first cry?
In Genesis, the creation process ends with man being created "from the dust of the ground" and waiting for life to be breathed into him. "God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life," much like the resuscitation technique we learned in first aid classes. Like someone blowing up a balloon patiently, he breathed life into his nostrils until he stood up and "became a living creature." The breath of God remained in man and gave him life.
And now, on the first day of the year, we repeat that first day when man was born, and blow our breath through the shofar, leaving part of ourselves in the ram's horn. As we do so, a cry rises, a "blow" that "erupts" into a great "blast." That is the rule: to give birth to a voice, we must exert our spirit; to rise above ourselves and where we are, we must pay the price of giving up part of ourselves.
Last year we also asked God to bring peace to the Land of Israel. And indeed, at the end of the Hebrew year we received a gift in the form of a peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates as well as a declaration of peace (which will develop into another agreement) with Bahrain. Dialogue with Saudi Arabia has been turned up a notch and is now happening openly. The days of the Messiah have come. These Arab countries have realized that a lack of relations with Israel cost them heavily, and that it was wrong to remain trapped by other pressure groups in the region. This peace deal signals a different paradigm for the Middle East.
A new year gives us hope of renewal, that we can snip off hanging threads in our lives and open windows to new, better things. This is another meaning of the shofar blast: wake up from the summer lethargy, from ideological fixation, from desperate thoughts; wake up and be renewed, because there is hope for how we will end. From the cracks in our lives a great cry will emerge that will become a great blast of the shofar for our freedom and we will ask, "Let the old year and its curses pass away, and a new year and its blessings begin." Shana Tova U'Metuka from Rome.
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