Rosh Hashanah Is Not the Real New Year

Here in Eretz Yisrael, as the heavy heat of summer finally eases, you can feel the season shifting. The nights cool, the air softens, and the earth prepares for rain. Grapes and figs have been harvested, the balance of the equinox arrives, and a new moon rises in the autumn sky. This is not the beginning of the year. It is the turning of the cycle.

And yet we are told this time is Rosh Hashanah — the “head of the year.”

The Torah tells a different story. In Exodus 12:2, G-d says clearly: “This month [Nisan] shall be for you the beginning of months.” The true new year comes in spring, when the Jewish people were born as a nation, stepping out of Egypt into freedom, when the land itself bursts with renewal.

That is the new year of the Torah, rooted in liberation, fertility, and the rebirth of nature. Tishrei, on the other hand, is called only “the seventh month.” Even its name, Tishrei, is not Hebrew but Babylonian, from the Akkadian tašrītu, meaning “beginning” or “inauguration.” Like the other Babylonian month names, it was adopted after the exile.

The rabbis of the Mishnah later reframed the first of Tishrei as the birthday of humanity, linking it to the creation of Adam and Chava and eventually making it the “new year.” That shift turned this season from renewal and freedom to judgment and fear.

Why? Perhaps because fear is easier to control than freedom. A people who believe their lives are written in a book of judgment are easier to regulate than a people who dance in the desert after liberation. Perhaps because Nisan, full of women’s leadership — Yocheved, Miriam, the midwives, the women dancing at the sea — was too wild and embodied to domesticate.

Tishrei could be ritualized, institutionalized, centralized in the synagogue and under male authority. Even the mystics, from the Baal Shem Tov to Chabad, had to reinterpret it, splitting the difference: Nisan as the new year of redemption, Tishrei as the new year of creation. But the very need to explain shows it was never the Torah’s original intent.

As a chozeret teshuvah, I once embraced all of this unquestioningly. I baked the challah, set the table, and believed that if I did it all right, I would be inscribed for life. And in many ways, I still do the things I’m “supposed” to do: I bake my round challahs, I dip apples in honey with my kids, I cook the festive meals. These are part of our culture and tradition, and I honor them. But I no longer confuse them with the essence of this season.

Because my true house of prayer is outdoors, walking in nature, talking to G-d with my whole heart. It is any moment of the day, all year long, when I pause to connect, to listen, to return.

Through 12-step recovery, I have been learning to override my old programming and live from my higher self, the truest version of me. Recovery has been my ongoing spiritual journey, teaching me that guilt and shame are not the path to G-d. Fear is not the path. The path is honesty, humility, repair, connection, and trust.

That is what this season really is: not a “new year,” but a turning, a returning. Living in this land makes that truth obvious. Springtime is when everything begins again, the real new year. Autumn is different: it is balance, the lifting of heat, the inward journey, the moment to return.

So perhaps “L’shana tova” is not the best greeting after all.

Perhaps instead we should bless each other with something more real, like “May this be a good season of return. May you find balance, may you find truth.”

Rosh Hashanah is not the new year. It is the great turning, the season of teshuvah, the moon of the soul. It is not about fear and judgment, but about trusting the One who always cares for us, who wants the best for us, and who gave us the ability to hear Him in our own hearts.

To question is not betrayal; it is faith. To trust ourselves, our intuition, our direct line to G-d — that is true emunah, that is real bitachon.

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