Happy New Year?

Sermon Parshat Vayigash, Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson

Tonight marks the first Shabbat of 2025, which means of course that last Wednesday was January 1st, New Year’s, a bright shining beginning to one of my 12 favorite months of the American calendar.  Actually, January is particularly high up there since it has the dubious merit of being the month when I celebrate my birthday… not that I particularly like to be reminded of the dubious progress of years any more.

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 tomorrow or next Monday is simply an arbitrary choice.  But Happy Arbitrary New Year doesn’t have much of a ring to it, does it?

Besides the arbitrary quality of it, here’s another odd New Year’s fact: although we are not really sure Jesus was a historical figure at all, and even if he was a historical figure he very likely wasn’t really born on December 25th, since no one paid taxes in Jerusalem at this time of year.  Too cold.  But if Jesus had been born on December 25th, then January 1st would have been the date of his bris, his ritual circumcision.  An unusual way to think about New Year’s, no?  The date of the circumcision of the Jewish guy on whose life one of the main non-Jewish religions was based?  Perhaps we could wish each other “Happy Jesus Bris Day”…

Not the way we think about New Year’s.  In fact, the traditional American celebration of New Year’s is pretty odd, too: dress up, go out to an expensive dinner and perhaps a big party, stay up until midnight, drink a lot of booze, especially champagne, and then nurse your hangover the next morning by watching parades and college bowl games while you think about making new year’s resolutions—like not to drink as much as you did the night before.  Or stay home and watch other people drink and wait for a big ball to drop on Times Square.  A very strange way to start a new year.

Tragically, this year a radicalized Islamist who served in the US military murdered 15 people celebrating New Year’s at 3am in the French Quarter of New Orleans.  Awful, and sad.  And strange.

As we have established, though, New Year’s Day is an arbitrary date.  But even years are established in a similarly arbitrary way: this year is not actually 2025 years from any notable date at all, really, including the date it supposedly reflects, the year of Jesus’ birth.  According to scholars, based on the events listed in the New Testament itself, if Jesus was a historical figure he was likely born in the year 6 BC; that is, Jesus was born 6 years before himself…  Now that would be miraculous!  And by the way, there is no year zero in the way we calculate dates currently.  That is, we go from 1 BC to 1 AD with no zero year.  It would be like going from 1999 to 2001 without the intervening year 2000.  So 2025 is actually 2024 years from a non-existent point in time.  Or something like that.  Very odd indeed.

But there is more oddity.  Speaking as a history buff, the people who lived in the first century, 2000 years ago, had no idea that they were living in the first century of anything.  In those days the calendar wherever you lived was usually dated from the beginning of the current royal house.  In Israel they dated the official years from the formal beginning of the Seleucid Empire around 250 BCE, which would make this coming year 2275, by the way, instead of 2025—or they used Roman dates, which were based on the Julian calendar, established arbitrarily, again, by Julius Caesar in the year 46 BCE, because January was named for Janus, the two faced Roman pagan god, and Caesar figured that a new year’s day should be two-faced as well—one looking backward and one looking forward.  At his orders on his Roman legal calendar the consuls changed office January 1st. That day became New Year’s for the government, which of course, then as now, everybody hated.  And so, for this weird reason, not the other weird reasons, we celebrate on January 1st today because the Roman consuls changed office more than two millennia ago.

Just to add to the peculiarity of New Year’s, supposedly Caesar celebrated that first January 1 New Year by ordering the violent routing of revolutionary Jewish forces in the Galilee.  Eyewitnesses say blood flowed in the streets.  In later years, Roman pagans observed the New Year by engaging in drunken orgies—a ritual they believed constituted a personal re-enacting of the chaotic world that existed before the cosmos was ordered by the gods.  I believe some New Year’s parties today try to echo those actions, sadly, if not for the same reasons.

There are other weird and negative New Year’s notes for Jews: the Israeli term for New Year’s night celebrations, “Sylvester,” was the name of the “Saint” and Roman Pope who reigned during the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 C.E.  The year before the Council of Nicaea convened, Pope Sylvester convinced the Emperor Constantine to prohibit Jews from living in Jerusalem.  At the Council of Nicaea itself, Pope Sylvester arranged for the passage of a host of viciously anti-Semitic legislation.  All Catholic “Saints” are awarded a day on which Christians celebrate and pay tribute to that Saint’s memory.  December 31 is Saint Sylvester Day - hence celebrations on the night of December 31 are dedicated to Sylvester’s memory, not a guy you would think Jews would ever celebrate… And yet Israelis call it Sylvester.  Stranger yet.

Now as to the randomness of the counting of years, frankly, we Jews aren’t any better.  Back in the first century we used a calendar that calculated the creation of the world as having taken place 3700 years before that first century—that’s why we are in the Jewish year 5785 now—which means we only missed the date of the actual creation of the world by about four and half billion years, give or take a hundred million years or so.

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 make this year 14 billion and, um, 25?  Not a fun date to put on a check or into an online form, right?

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 2025 years from nothing real at all.  But no matter how arbitrary or strange, what any New Year’s provides is an opportunity to gain some 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 even forced, is a very good thing.

So, on this secular just slightly post-New Year’s weekend, looking backward at 2025, we can perhaps note that it was far from the happiest year in recent memory.  As I noted last year, it was perhaps Israel’s most challenging year, yet it ended with Israel in a much stronger strategic position, and perhaps a weaker one diplomatically and in public opinion, that any in recent memory.  It was a year that saw an outpouring of antisemitism unlike anything we have seen for years.  It was a turbulent year in American politics, and a one in which the temperature of public discourse ranged from overheated to vicious.  It was a complicated year, 2024. 

It was difficult, challenging, turbulent.  I am reminded of the Rosh haShanah piyyut that we sang this year: 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 that perspective can give us 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 values and purposes than the hard things that happen.

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 mean more than the events that gather all the attention.

Perhaps on this arbitrary New Year’s weekend we can all learn a bit from the Jewish way of observing New Year’s, as we did back in October on Rosh HaShanah.  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 seek greater closeness with those we love and care about.  If we can do that, than this 2025 year, however artificial, can be a blessing to all of us.

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