CBI Blogs

The High Holy Days are late this year.

I know, I know…they always start on the first of Tishrei, so they are always right on time. We measure our lives by time and by what is happening when. But time is a construct—a measurement of distance and how we move through space. You have probably heard that the term “light year” is a measurement of how far light travels in a year. I was always told it is bad form to use the word one is defining in the definition, so what is a year? A year is the distance the earth travels around the sun. A day is the distance we travel around the center of the planet as it rotates one time. Time is movement, and how we center our measurements can have a huge impact on how we view the world and ourselves.

The Hebrew calendar is lunar—it was created following the movement of the moon. When we see a thin sliver of silver in the sky, that is the beginning of a lunar month. The Gregorian calendar is a solar calendar—it was created following the movement of the sun. Its anchor points are the two equinoxes and two solstices. Everything else falls into place from those four moments, including the beginning of each season. We tend to measure the movement of our lives through the Gregorian calendar, so when the Jewish holidays jump around on that calendar, even if they are constant on the Hebrew calendar, it feels like they come early or late.

So the High Holy Days feel late this year.

Even when we talk about our position in time, we use the vocabulary of movement. We may be behind a deadline, or we may show up ahead of everyone else. We might say the holidays are fast approaching, or that summer went by so fast. So when a holiday feels early or late, we, in turn, react to how it moves around, and how we will approach it.

As you read this it should just before the Hebrew month of Elul—the last month on the Hebrew calendar, the month just before the High Holy Days. If we get ready properly, we have plenty of room to prepare for everything we have to do. These could be physical activities like inviting friends and family for Rosh Hashanah dinner and preparing meals, or they could be mental activities like making sure we have apologized to anyone we may have wronged over the last year.

Another mental activity is reading and getting ourselves mentally ready for the holidays. Much like a runner will stretch before a run, and train before a marathon, we need to prepare and train before the ten-day marathon of cheshbon hanefesh (self reflection) that are the Days of Awe.

To help with this preparation, we are enlisting the help of 30 Reform rabbis, cantors, and educators across North America. Starting next Wednesday, September 4, you will receive a daily email from CBI with an “Elul Thought.” (On Fridays we will send two thoughts in one email so that we can avoid emailing on Shabbat.) These are commentaries on texts, presentations of ideas and poems, even a link to an Elul playlist on Spotify. All of them serve to prepare us as a community for the High Holy Days, so that we can approach this marathon with the proper preparation, and enter our sacred season tighter with readiness and strength.

We hope you enjoy them, learn from them, and grow from them. We will go back to our regular schedule of weekly emails in 5785.