Faces on Faith: Jewish New Year has begun
The Jewish New Year of 5787 has begun.
Traditionally, it is a time to examine our deeds and the state of our relationships and resolve to do better.
For some it is hard to be hopeful for this New Year. We are often overwhelmed by a rapidly changing and chaotic world. Critical elections in a few months both here and in Israel that will determine the shape and scope of Democracy and whether we can build a great society with compassion at its core.
The great Rabbi, Nachman of Bratslav taught; “believe that if you can break – you can also fix.” I choose to believe it.
Most of our spiritual traditions teach us that the pendulum of life swings both ways and what seems bleak today will change for the better. Sometimes in an instant. It is inevitable and history bears this out. We learn this lesson in the third chapter of Book of Ecclesiastes.
You know well its most famous passages.
“A time to be born, a time to die…
A time to weep, a time to laugh…” etc.
And it concludes with “a time of war, a time of peace.”
Let us give thanks to Pete Seeger for the words and to the Byrds for the definitive musical rendition of Turn, Turn, Turn.
Ecclesiastes names 28 seasons. 28 “times.” A time for this and a time for that. A time for an action and a time for its countervailing action.
The rabbis of medieval Talmud taught that human history, as we understand it, will last 6,000 years and then the time of the Messiah will arrive. We are now beginning the year 5787 which means that we need wait only another 213 years for the arrival of the Messiah.
Now before you say; “So, what, I won’t be around to see it,” let me share with you a teaching by the Vilna Gaon – The Genius of Vilna, the leader of the Lithuanian Jewish community for most of the 18th century. He is considered one of the greatest teachers of Bible and Law in Jewish history.
I must pause to offer thanks to Chaya Lester my teacher and colleague for many decades, for highlighting this teaching in her podcast from Jerusalem.
The Vilna Gaon maps these 28 seasons across the traditional 6,000 years of human history. Twenty-eight appointed times through which the world itself must travel, unfolding in sequence across 6,000 years.
The Vilna Gaon lays out a reality map through human history. He takes the 6000 years of history and divides that number by the 28 Ecclesiastical periods of time, the seasons, yielding 214.2857 years each.
That is 214 years and 104 days.
Counting back 214 years from the year 6000 brings us to 5786, the Hebrew year that began last Rosh Hashanah and ended two weeks ago on the evening of this Rosh Hashanah, Sept. 11, 2026.
But, to be accurate, as I pointed out above, we have to move back another 104 days.
Where does that bring us? June 13, 2025.
That was the day that Israel and the United States launched the first missile attacks on Iran in an attempt to eradicate its nuclear program and Iran responded sending hundreds of missiles to rain down on Israel, sending its’ citizens into bomb shelters on a daily basis, sometimes multiple times each day.
According to this calculation, that very day marked the threshold between Kohelet’s 27th and 28th seasons of history. In Ecclesiastes chapter 3, what was the 27th season?
A time for war.
Look at the roughly 214 years that preceded this threshold.
They contained some of the most devastating warfare humanity has ever known: World War I, World War II, industrialized warfare, genocide, and tens of millions upon tens of millions killed through war and mass violence.
If ever an era in human history could bear the name “a time for war,” surely this one could.
Now what comes next?
A TIME FOR PEACE. The 28th and final season before the coming of the Messiah.
Perhaps peace does not always begin by looking peaceful. Sometimes the gateway to peace is the courage to confront what destroys it. Perhaps beneath the noise and grief and upheaval in our world the season has shifted.
We cannot know. But as we stand at the doorway of 5787, I choose to believe it. I choose to hang my hope upon the possibility that we have crossed some invisible threshold of history.
That all this terrible shaking is not only the breaking of an old world, but the birth pangs of a new one.
The Talmud refers to this time of tribulation as chevlei mashiach, the birth pangs of the messiah. This transition is likened to a woman in labor. A time of great danger and discomfort, but at the conclusion, new life.
So let us all pray and share our intention with others that 5787 bring us ever more fully into the Time of Peace. And if, to us, things look a bit hopeless, remember the words of another member of the legendary rock group the Byrds, the late David Crosby. “For you know the darkest hour, is always, just before the dawn.”
Rabbi Sunny Schnitzer is from Bat Yam Temple of the Islands