SEATTLE — Some of your coworkers might not be in work on Monday, as Jewish people around the world will celebrate their new year.
Most Jews don’t work on the holiday, which starts Sunday night and lasts 24-to-48 hours, depending on custom.
Here are some things you need to know about the holiday:
Why is it called Rosh Hashana?
In Hebrew, Rosh means “head,” and “hashana” means = “the year”.
What is a shofar?
The most well-known symbol of Rosh Hashana is the shofar. It is a hollowed-out ram’s horn, kind of like a bugle in that there are no keys, so the sound it makes depends entirely on how it is blown.
Someone of high honor at each synagogue will blow it up to 100 times over the course of the day to celebrate the new year.
The Jewish new year is celebrated every autumn, and the two most widely-accepted explanations are:
- According to the Old Testament – autumn is when Adam & Eve were created.
- It is the start of the harvest season (or, it is six months after the start of the spring harvest, to be specific).
Rosh Hashana is almost always in September, but why does the date change every year?
The Hebrew calendar is based on a luni-solar calendar (a combination of the solar year and the lunar month). It runs on a 19-year cycle, meaning that every 19 years, Rosh Hashana should fall on the same date (although there are exceptions to prevent it from falling on Sunday, Wednesday or Friday).
What happens on the holiday?
Those who celebrate the holiday spend a lot of time on Rosh Hashana at synagogue, singing and praying. It is a festival atmosphere, but not like the traditional celebrations before the calendar New Year on Jan. 1. There is a more introspective feel throughout the services, focusing on what one has done wrong in the previous year, and how to improve in the next one.
Among the traditional foods are honey (to signify a sweet new year) and instead of traditional Challah (delicious, kneaded dough that is shaped like a loaf of bread), Jews eat Challah shaped in a circle, to symbolize the cycle of the year.
One final custom is “Tashlich”. (Hebrew meaning: to cast), where Jews will throw bread crumbs into any natural body of water (pond, river, lake or ocean) to symbolize casting away one’s sins. This helps the process of introspection - promising to do better in the year to come.