New Year

Since I began this blog with the Jewish New Year, I figure it's only right to note the secular New Year, the eve of which I spent having a fancy dinner with family and seeing the movie "Stranger Than Fiction" with my husband. Very exciting.
The movie ended at 12:05 AM on January 1st, so we spent the very beginning of 2007 watching the very end of a movie made in 2006. I'm sure there is some meaning to be found in this, especially since the movie is "meta," but I don't feel like "unpacking" it, as they say.

As a friend of mine noted, Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year, always feels like more of a new beginning, coming as it does with the onset of the fall harvest and the school year, which will always have more meaning - no matter how much of an adult I become - than the tax year, which is the only thing that's really new in January. Strange that the BEGINNING of the new year is the END of the holiday season.

Which reminds me of a question my non-Jewish friend asked about the Jewish New Year. Why, she wondered, does Yom Kippur, the final day of atonement for one's sins from the past year, when one's fate for the coming year is sealed in the Book of Life, come AFTER Rosh Hashana, which is a time of repentance but more so of celebration and hopefulness for the coming year? I thought it was an excellent question and one I'd never thought of before. We asked some people knowledgeable about Judaism and were unable to get a satisfying answer. But this whole END/BEGINNING connection gives me a good idea.

Rosh Hashana celebrates the new year in the same celebratory way that secular new year's eve does (similarly, anyway -- without all the alcohol and sex but probably with more gluttony, a sin Jews don't really believe in). But then that's not the end. After making all your New Year's resolutions, you have ten days of the New Year where you're supposed to follow through. You rejoiced and you said you were going to do better so now you have ten days to start proving it. So it reminds us that the BEGINNING is not the END of celebration and of renewal. Rather, it's the BEGINNING of a commitment to do better this year.

But you know, there's no champagne on Rosh Hashana, so New Year's Eve has that going for it.