When I tell people that Judaism marks a new year four times during each Gregorian year, they’re usually a little confused. Surely that can’t be right, their eyes seem to say, because how would you know what year you’re in?
But it is true. Time doesn’t have to be a linear progression from point A to B and on into the so-called future; it’s fully possible to be inhabiting several layers of time at once. I’m not in just one year—I’m in a bunch of them. It’s more a helix than a timeline, the way I experience it.
New beginnings are all over the place. Several versions of me are traipsing around the world at the same time.
This week’s Torah portion designates one of the moments in the calendar that is considered a new year. “This month shall mark for you the beginning of the months; it shall be the first of the months of the year for you,” God tells Moses in Exodus 12:2, and he doesn’t mean Rosh HaShanah, which will occur many months later. He means the month in which the Israelites will walk out of Egypt.
These days, we call that holiday Passover, or Pesach, but in the original biblical texts it’s not that at all. Rashi (possibly the best known Torah scholar) agrees, contending that “no Scriptural verse can lose its literal meaning, and He really spoke this in reference to [this] month.” The year starts at the crossing of the Red Sea…
