Adloyada: The Jewish New Year: An account of the soul

In the Jewish calendar, this is the last day of the month of Ellul. That's the month before Tishrei, when the Jewish new year, or Rosh Hashona starts. That will be on Monday evening. It's supposed to be a time of Cheshbon Nefesh, which means an account of the soul. Well, basically it's supposed to be the time when you clean up your act and review what you've done over the last year.

In particular, you say sorry to the people you ought to say sorry to, and you make amends where you should make amends. In your prayers, you should acknowledge and admit your lapses in your obligations to your Creator. Like any to do with observing what you should observe. And you should acknowledge your bad thoughts, like covetousness and jealousy. Very few Jews actually do this. Even fewer actually try to do it throughout the month of Ellul. Mostly just those like me who are observant Orthodox.

Very committed observant reform Jews may also do some form of Cheshbon Nefesh in a more open-ended way--- perhaps reviewing their year or trying to make amends where they know they should. And I don't do anything like the whole hog. I've got a large book of the penitential prayers you should say. But those cover the last week, which we're just completing, and the ten Yomim Noraim, or Days of Awe, before Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Which more or less counts as the day of reckoning. I find the penitential prayer series has nothing like the impact on me of the prayers of the siddur, or daily prayerbook, and the Rosh Hashona and Yom Kippur services.

When I was little, I often got bored in synagogue. But once I could read, I would pass the time reading whatever prayerbook we were supposed to be using for that festival. I could always find a prayer text that I was fascinated by and liked to read. My favourites were ones that offered me visions of a Creator, governing the world with lovingkindess and thy creatures with compassion, and I also particularly liked those that presented the grandeur of the natural world.

These words are taken from one that was always a text I would return to, and sit there reading as child, wondering about the superlatives of aspiration it set before me. It's called Nishmas Kol Chai: the Soul of Every Living Thing.

Though our mouths were full of song as the sea, our tongues of exultation as the fulness of waves, and our lips of praise as the plains of the firmament; though our eyes gave light as the sun and the moon; though our hands were outspread as the eagles of heaven, and our feet were as swift as hinds, yet should we be unable to thank thee.

One of the things that astonishes me about that is that it's a daily prayer, not just something saved for the grandeur of a festival like Rosh Hashona.

There are so many magnificent prayer-texts that we say over the new year services that it's impossible to select one or two to give the flavour. The whole service is rather like being in a grand Handel oratorio, like The Messiah. It's all accapela singing, and the haunting and poignant tunes are ones we only sing during the days of Rosh Hashona and Yom Kippur. Only instead of listening to an oratorio, you're...well, pleading that you will be judged favourably for the coming year. For things like happiness, health and even life itself.

The image you're constantly presented with is of having your name written down in a series of books of judgement. Of course, with my teaching background and interest in handwriting, that has its appeal. I used to enjoy telling the trainee teachers I taught that we spend quite a lot of Rosh Hashona repeatedly praying for teachers.

And not just written down, sealed, too. Which happens on Yom Kippur. The concept of sealing evokes some scenes of 1948, when I was four. I can just about remember it as the year we were sending food parcels to our family in Israel, at the point it came into existence. We had cousins in Jerusalem then, as well as our cousins in Tel-Aviv and Haifa. There was a siege on in Jerusalem; I doubt it affected Tel-Aviv, but we sent them a food parcel anyway. And that was packaged up beautifully by my mother in brown paper, tied and knotted with strong white string. She made a red sealing-wax seal on every knot. I loved the smell of the hot sealing wax and the beauty of the molten wax as it covered the knot. I was thrilled to be allowed to hold the stick of wax as she directed me and held the flame to it to make it drop its seals in the right place.

In those days, our family and every family I knew of sent out little pre-printed new year cards to family and friends. They looked like business cards, but I think they were probably based on the English upper class tradition of calling cards. You would have them pre-printed with your family's name and address, and there would be big decisions to be made about whether you had them printed deckle-edged or gold edged. I remember my mother's strict concern that ours should be decent, but of course not showy.

Apart from our family name and address, they would carry the traditional new year greeting in Hebrew and English. The English translation was: May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year.

I don't know quite when that fashion died out. Probably during the long period of my adolescence and early adult life when I was having nothing to do with Jewish practice.

Now, most people tend to send electronic cards if they send them at all. They almost always have images of apples and honey on them, and many follow the Israeli custom of wishing you shana tova u'metukah-- which I've transcribed in the Israeli modern Hebrew pronunciation. You are wished a good and sweet year. Not quite the same resonance at all as being inscribed and sealed in a book. But it's not quite secularised, because there is a part of the ritual you do at home for each meal over Rosh Hashona, which is to dip pieces of apple in honey and say a prayer asking that it will be the will of the Almighty that the year will be renewed for us as a good and sweet one.

Still, I do like my new year greetings to be just a little more robust than that.

i've written in Hebrew the traditional May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year. Then I've quoted two pleas from the magnificent Ovinu Malkeinu prayer, which we say and sing as a swelling whole-congregation chorus at various dramatic points during the service. One pleads, may we be inscribed in the book of the happy life. Sounds wonderful to me. The other asks may we be inscribed in the book of redemption and salvation. If we take that literally, that's the End of Days, and we Jews will all find ourselves in Jerusalem.... Which has its appeal. But my family on both sides come from the Hassidic tradition which all my grandparents were brought up in. The Hassidic tradition always took interesting liberties with translations. And in the spirit of that, I'd say that the plea is about being redeemed and saved from despair and depression, from cynicism and pessimism. Which is something most of us need at some time or another during the course of a year.

The image I've chosen is special for me, because it's a composite photo my daughter took of a pathway that runs across a little park between the King David Hotel and the walls of the Old City, where she's been living and studying. The year we are just finishing, 5765, has been a very special year for me and her for all sorts of reasons. One of the most interesting is that it being her nineteenth birthday, it marked the first year since she was born that her Hebrew and her secular calendar birthdates, 20th Tevet and 1st January, fell on the same day. The Jewish calendar fixes it that this will always happen every nineteen years. The Jewish tradition doesn't make that much of this cycle, and most Jews don't even know when their Hebrew calendar birthday is. Celebrating birthdays was traditionally reckoned as a non-Jewish custom, to be avoided. But I like this once-every-nineteen years cycle. It seems that it represents a rare fusion of the religious and the secular dimensions of existence.

So her next time will be when she's thirty eight, and I'll be coming up to my eightieth birthday. I doubt if I'll be around for the next time, when she'll be fifty-seven, and I'd be moving towards...ninety-nine. Extraordinarily, her boyfriend and she have literally adjacent birthdays, because he was born on the 21st Tevet/2nd January in the same year.

I was in Jerusalem for her nineteenth birthday, and it was a Shabbos too. It had rained most of the preceding week, and it went on to rain some more for the following days. But that day, it suddenly turned bright and sunny, like a warm English spring day. I'd arranged with a little French hotel near the King David that they would provide us Sabbath meals, and I took her and a little group of her friends for our meals there. We walked there across the snake path several times in the course of that beautiful day. It's a very happy memory of 5765.

And I hope all the wishes I've written will come to all of you who celebrate the Jewish new year of 5766. May it come to us all for good, whether we celebrate it or not. May we all be inscribed and sealed for a good year, a year of happy life and a year free of all sorrow and sadness.