Hiking in the Holyland: A new year brings a change in the air

There’s a change happening out there. I know this because I’m a sunrise person. For the past few months, dawn has been hard to come by. In summertime, the heat arrives early in the day and with intensity – it can feel oppressive by six in the morning.

When I see clouds outside at dawn, I lace my shoes with lightning speed. I head up toward the hills past the synagogue, where the shofar pours through an open window like an alarm clock announcing the shifting season.

Rather than calling our attention to the world of possibility outdoors, this season invites introspection and contemplation, a preparation for the quiet, determined growth of the long year ahead.

It’s strange, when you think about it, that this should feel like a beginning at all. The school year starts now, but that’s an invention of the last century or two.

Agriculturally, this is an ending: the last fruit coming off the trees, the grain already gathered and stored.

The rest of the world treats autumn as the year winding down.

We treat it as the year opening up. I’ve been wondering whether there’s something real underneath that, or whether we’ve simply learned to lean into what we’re told to feel.

And yet, a few chapters later, describing the pilgrimage festivals, the same book places the autumn holiday at “the Feast of Ingathering, at the going out of the year” (Exodus 23:16), and later at “the turning of the year” (Exodus 34:22). A year going out. A year turning over. In autumn.

Stranger still is what the Torah does not say. The day we call Rosh Hashanah is never called that. It appears only as the first day of “the seventh month,” a sacred occasion “commemorated with loud blasts” (Leviticus 23:24). The seventh month, which is somehow also the beginning of the year.

The usual resolution is that two calendars run at once. One counts the life of a nation and begins with the Exodus. The other counts the life of the earth and mankind, and begins with Rosh Hashanah. But growing up outside of Israel, I never fully grasped what it meant for the calendar of creation to begin in autumn.

What crystallized it for me was living here long enough to watch this calendar at work.

There’s no clean break in an Israeli autumn. No frost, no changing leaves, none of the sweater weather and pumpkin lattes so prevalent in the United States.

While camping in northern Israel a couple of weeks ago, I lay awake under a star-filled sky trying to figure out what season it was exactly. Sleeping in our tents on the dusty ground, we enjoyed a cool breeze at night.

That day, we had seen grapes heavy on the vine on a nearby nature trail. Olives were everywhere, still green and hard in their clusters. It was clearly going to be a good year for olives.

Here, summer just sort of bleeds into fall. The changes are almost imperceptible – ripe fruit, more migratory birds. The earth itself has settled into seeming dormancy, dusty and cracked from five rainless months.

But a plot of earth at its most barren is just a field ready for planting, for human effort, and the hope of divine blessing. So the feeling isn’t invented after all. Here, the agricultural year really does begin now, in the dust, before a single drop has fallen. Rosh Hashanah coincides with the season that asks us to plan diligently and to put our faith in God at the same time.

Rambam said the call of the shofar is there to awaken us from our slumber. During this new year, we can tune in to the rhythm offered so naturally by our surroundings here in Israel. Just like those empty fields, we are ready and waiting for the slow growth we aspire to in the long year ahead.