Artificial and Real—New Year’s Eve Shabbat 2022

Sermon New Year’s Eve Shabbat 2022, Shabbat Va’Eira 5782
Shabbat Shalom and Happy New Year!  Of course, it’s not really a Jewish new year, although it certainly can be fun to celebrate it.  In fact, we were discussing the possibility of dropping a large ball from the ceiling during my sermon, and someone suggested we drop a large matzah ball, but then saner heads prevailed.  I mean, it’s nice to wear a tuxedo once a year, and to dress up in finery and sip champagne at shul and eat fancy hors d’oeuvres instead of bagels and lox, and use black tablecloths and put sparkly stuff on the tables.    

It’s all very artificial.  But really, that’s appropriate, because all calendaring is quite artificial, in truth.  January 1st is no different in any intrinsic way from December 31st or January 2nd, so making January 1st into New Year’s instead of, say, February 1st is simply an arbitrary choice.  But saying “Happy Arbitrary New Year” doesn’t have much of a ring to it, does it?

Here’s an odd New Year’s fact that might change your whole perception of this evening, maybe forever.  While we are not really sure that Jesus was a historical figure at all, but if he was a historical figure, he likely wasn’t really born on December 25th.  But if Jesus had been born on December 25th then January 1st would have been the eighth day after his birth, and as a Jewish boy that would make it the date of his bris, his ritual circumcision.  Perhaps we should be wishing each other “Happy Jesus’ Bris Day” instead of Happy New Year.

An unusual way to think about New Year’s, no? 

Of course, that’s not really the way we think about New Year’s.  In fact, the American celebration of New Year’s is odd enough all by itself: dress up in fancy clothes, go out to an expensive dinner or a party, stay up until midnight, drink a lot of booze, especially champagne, watch a large ball descend into Times Square on TV—and then nurse your hangover the next morning watching parades and college bowl games while you think about making new year’s resolutions—resolutions like not to drink as much as you did the night before.  A strange way to start to a new year.

I must note that even the years we mark were established in a similarly arbitrary way.  This year is not actually 2022 years from any notable date at all, including the date it supposedly reflects, the year of Jesus’ birth.  According to scholars, based on the events in the New Testament itself, if Jesus was a historical figure, he was likely born in the year 6 BC; that is, he was born 6 years before himself.  Now that would truly be miraculous!  By the way, there is no year zero the way we calculate years.  That is, we go from 1 BC to 1 AD with no zero year in our history books and timelines.  That’s like going from 1999 to 2001 without the intervening year 2000.  So 2022 is actually 2022 years from a non-existent point in time. 

There is more oddity.  Speaking historically, the people who lived in the first century, 2000 years ago, had no idea they were living in the first century of anything.  In those days the calendar was usually dated from the beginning of the current royal house.  In Israel, for example, they dated official years from the formal beginning of the Seleucid Empire around 250 BCE, which if it were still true would make this year 2272, instead of 2022.  Alternatively, back then in Israel, they used Roman dates, which were based on the Julian calendar, established arbitrarily by Julius Caesar in the year 46 BCE.  He made New Year’s January 1st because the month of January was named for Janus, the two-faced Roman pagan god, and Caesar figured that a new years’ day should therefore be two-faced as well—one looking backward and one looking forward.  At his orders on Caesar’s Roman legal calendar the consuls, the top Roman officials, changed on January 1st. That became New Year’s for the government, which, then as now, everybody distrusted and more or less hated.  And so, for this weird 2000-year-old reason we will celebrate New Year’s starting after midnight as January 1st.

There are other unusual New Year’s notes for Jews: the Israeli term for New Year’s night celebrations is “Sylvester.” Now, Israelis calling New Year’s Eve and day “Sylvester” is more than a bit bizarre.  The name “Sylvester” does not come from the cartoon cat who was paired with Tweety Bird, but rather from the name of the “Saint” and Roman Pope who reigned during the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 C.E.  While that’s obscure enough, there is a very dark side to this Sylvester.  The year before the Council of Nicaea, in 324 CE, it was this Sylvester who convinced the Roman Emperor Constantine to prohibit Jews from living in Jerusalem.  Then at the Council of Nicaea, Sylvester also thoughtfully arranged for the passage of a host of viciously anti-Semitic legislation that was later incorporated into nearly every anti-Jewish legal code in the Byzantine Empire and throughout Western Civilization.  So why do Israeli Jews celebrate a day dedicated to a vicious anti-Semite who did serious and enduring damage to our people some 1700 years ago?

Well, it’s like this.  Since all Catholic “Saints” are awarded a day on which Christians celebrate and pay tribute to that Saint’s memory, and December 31st is Saint Sylvester Day, celebrations on the night of December 31st are technically dedicated to Sylvester’s memory, not a guy you would think that Jews would ever celebrate, especially in an era when Anti-Semitism is on the rise yet again.

Now as to the randomness of the counting of years, frankly, we Jews aren’t any better about that.  First, we have a tradition of multiple new year’s every year.

Rosh HaShanah is the most familiar one, of course, and a famous Mishnah at the beginning of the tractate on Rosh HaShanah teaches us that it is the new year for counting years, and for calculating the sabbatical and jubilee years.  It is also, of course, the new year for the soul, the day of judgment when we take account of our actions and seek to repent our sins and return to goodness and holiness.  The appropriate time for new year’s resolutions is therefore Rosh haShanah, not January 1st. 

The other new years’ delineated in traditional sources include the beginning of the springtime month of Nissan, in late March or early April, which was the new year’s for governmental affairs in ancient times and also the new year for marking holidays, making Passover, springtime freedom festival, the first holiday of the year, idiosyncratically not Rosh HaShanah. 

Then there is Tu Bishvat, the new year for trees—that’s coming up on January 16th, two weeks from Sunday, by the way, and the day we will enjoy our very special TV to Torah event with Rabbi and Cantor Baruch Cohon—anyway, on Tu Bishvat they believed that sap began to flow in the trees in mid-winter, a kind of environmentally conscious new year.  And finally, there was a tax new year, our ancestor’s version of April 15th, which occurred about a month before Rosh HaShanah at the start of Elul. 

Four Jewish new year’s; that’s not counting some later new year’s that could be tallied, too, like Simchat Torah, the new year for Torah, when we begin reading the Torah all over again at the end of the fall holiday cycle.  Four new year’s may impress you as about three too many…

In addition, we Jews have some interesting ways of calculating what year it is, too.  Back in the 1st century we used a calendar that calculated the creation of the world as having taken place 3700 years before that 1st century—that’s why we are in the Jewish year 5782 now. Which means we missed the date of the actual creation of the world by only about 4½ billion years, give or take a hundred million years or so.

I’m reminded of the theme song from the show The Big Bang Theory, sung by the rock group The Barenaked Ladies—that’s their name.  It begins, “Our whole universe was in a hot dense state, then 14 billion years ago expansion started; the earth began to cool…” and so on.  Perhaps we should be counting our years from the real beginning of everything, the true Breisheet moment of the creation of the universe some 14 billion years ago when God really began everything in that ultimate moment of singularity.  That would be the true birthday of the world, Rosh HaShanah, as Jews believe.  I’m afraid that writing 14 billion and 20 years on the dateline of a check would be a little difficult; you probably couldn’t even include it in a Google calendar. 

In any case, the ikkar, the essential meaning of all this is that this New Year isn’t really the beginning of anything unique, and we are counting 2022 years from, well, nothing real at all.  But no matter how arbitrary or strange, what any New Year’s provides is an opportunity to gain perspective, that most elusive and most important quality.  For in the dailiness of our lives we become enmeshed in the details of making our own years functional and livable.  And taking the opportunity to look backward and ahead, however artificial or forced, can be a very good thing.

In fact, this year has been a mixed blessing for Jews—as most years prove to be.  While we here at Beit Simcha were able to open to increasing number of congregants and guests, and we have now grown in membership and activity beyond pre-pandemic levels, there have been plenty of challenges and roadblocks along the way.  We are now entering the third—or is it the fourth?—wave of Covid-19 infections, the gift that keeps on giving, Omicron and rising.  With all the many blessings we have had in the past 12 months, we have also seen loss and sadness and stress.  I am reminded of the Rosh haShanah piyut, the liturgical poetic prayer we sing on the High Holy Days: let the old year and its curses end; let the new year and its blessings begin.

And yet, it was only one year.  And the great gift perspective provides is to know that nothing, no matter how challenging, is permanent; that no situation, good or bad, is forever; that there is an arc, a path, a progression to life that goes well beyond the immediate changes and trends.  It is the gift of knowing that there are, no matter what the vicissitudes and vagaries of events and fashions, greater goals and purposes than the hard things that happen today.

It is knowing that we have, in our hands at any and every moment, the ability to make our lives more beautiful and more sacred, and that those efforts ultimately will mean more than the events that gather all the attention.

Perhaps in this arbitrary New Year period we can all learn a bit from the Jewish way of observing New Year’s, as we did back in September during our wonderful 3rd Rosh HaShanah for Beit Simcha.  That is, we can and probably should take the time to examine our past year and look forward to finding ways to atone for our mistakes and to seeking greater closeness with those we love and care about.  It is a time to dedicate ourselves to those causes that have most meaning to us, to improving our lives and our relationships, to supporting our synagogue, to making our society better and more just.  That’s the Jewish way to celebrate a new year, even an arbitrary one like 2022. 

If we can do that, then this year, however artificial, can be a blessing to all of us.  And if our congregation continues to do that then we will truly bring blessing to the world.

May you be blessed with a pseudo-New Year of joy, family, and love.  And may you find in your hearts and in your homes shalom v’shalvah, peace and tranquility, and a year of health and happiness.