Preparing for the Feast of Trumpets

A big part of my walking through the Jewish feasts this year is my reading and study to understand what each holy day is about. I have a pretty good grasp on Sabbath and Passover, but several of the others elude me.

As we come up on the first feast day of the year, the Feast of Trumpets, or Rosh Hashanah, I find myself poring over books and websites to tell me not only what to do, but why.

Rosh Hashanah (New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) are the holiest days of the year. They are also difficult to understand because they mark an inward growth and transformation. These holidays call us to introspection and prayer.

Preparation for Rosh Hashanah actually begins a month before with daily prayer, reflection, and repentance. These days in the month of Elul are said to remind us of Moses' second trip up Mount Sinai to get a replacement set of the ten commandments after Moses broke the first set in the golden calf incident. No wonder we think of this as a time of repentance. I bet the wandering children of Israel, even with their short attention span, were truly sorry for what they'd done. To remember this time, today's Jews go through a period of prayer focused heavily on God's mercy (Ex. 34:6-7).

On Rosh Hashanah, as on most of the feast days, there is an aspect of looking back and an aspect of looking forward. Here is the whole instruction of what God wanted the Feast of Trumpets to be:

The LORD said to Moses, "Say to the Israelites: 'On the first day of the seventh month you are to have a day of sabbath rest, a sacred assembly, commemorated with trumpet blasts. Do no regular work, but present a food offering to the LORD.'" (Lev. 23:23-25)

It's not much to go on, is it? That might explain why much of this holiday's tradition has developed over the centuries. Tradition says that the Feast of Trumpets reminds us of the trumpets Joshua and his army blew as they marched around Jericho (God fights our battles), of the ram's horn that got caught in the bramble, saving Isaac from being sacrificed by his father (God provides the sacrifice for us), the sound of the trumpet on Mount Sinai that signaled that God was speaking (God speaks).

Looking forward from that point, we know Jesus will return with the sound of trumpets (1 Cor. 15:51-52; 1 Thes. 4:16-18; Mat. 24:31), but did you know he also might have already arrived to the sound of trumpets? Tradition suggests Jesus may have been born on Rosh Hashanah, his birth on earth announced by the blowing of the shofar in every synagogue in Israel.

This weekend, around the world, the trumpets will sound. I'll write about some of the activities associated with Rosh Hashanah once I've experienced them myself and allowed their significance to soak in.

 Looking back, looking forward.

Photo credit: rbarenblat via Visualhunt.com / CC BY-NC-SA