Ancient Jews had four days that qualified as New Years. Some of them marked the start of agricultural seasons and some marked new religious movements like the Exodus. Rosh Hashanah marks the civil new year and occurs in September. Kids in my church like it because our school district makes it a holiday. The significance to Jews is that this was the starting point of God’s creation. There is only one vague reference to this holiday in the Old Testament [Numbers 29:1] but later rabbis expanded it.
Rosh Hashanah is considered a fearful day because people they know will die between one Rosh Hashanah and the next. Maybe it will be us. On Rosh Hashanah they come before God and acknowledge how powerless they are and to ask God to give them another year.
The Jewish service on that day contains a sobering prayer: “On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed – how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword and who by beast, who by famine and who by thirst, who by earthquake and who by plague, who by strangling and who by stoning.”
Rabbi Daniel Judson was once asked to lead a Rosh Hashanah service in Laramie, Wyoming. He was stunned to see that the Torah – the handwritten scroll of the first fives books of the Bible and the holiest object in Jewish religion – was being housed in a gun rack. A gun rack happens to be just the right size and shape to hold a Torah but he had never hunted in his life or even shot a gun, so a gun rack seemed to him to contradict what the Torah stood for, God’s peace.
When he mentioned it to one of the synagogue members, the man said quite calmly, “Rabbi, on Rosh Hashanah we are meant to feel the power of life and death – a gun rack will get us in that mind-set a heck of a lot quicker than any ordinary Torah ark.” Rabbi Dan had to agree with that. [1]
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1. Rabbi Kerry M. Olitzky and Rabbi Daniel Judson, “Jewish Holidays: A Brief Introduction for Christians” (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2007).