A Year of Fullness Rosh Hashanah 5787

Rosh Hashanah usually announces itself with the sound of the shofar, a human breath transformed into a sacred call that awakens the soul and proclaims the sovereignty of G’d. This year begins differently, with the holiness of Shabbat already present when the New Year arrives, allowing 5787 to begin in a state of rest, sanctity, and divine completeness before we have sounded even one note.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe wrote about precisely such a year, explaining that when the first day of Rosh Hashanah coincides with Shabbat, the holiness of the two days becomes joined together, giving the beginning of the year a distinct spiritual character that should influence the days that follow. Rosh Hashanah serves as the rosh, the head of the year, and Shabbat places within that head the quality of sacred rest, allowing the entire year to begin from a place where holiness precedes human effort.

That beginning carries a beautiful instruction for 5787, because this year possesses another distinction that makes it particularly rich: it is a shanah shleimah, a complete year, containing the maximum possible number of days in the Jewish calendar.

The Jewish calendar can contain between 353 and 385 days, depending upon the configuration of the months and whether the year contains an additional month. This year contains thirteen months, with thirty days in both Cheshvan and Kislev, bringing 5787 to the full 385 days available within the Jewish calendar. Those 385 days divide precisely into 55 complete weeks, creating a year in which every day belongs to a complete week and every week belongs to a complete year.

The calendar itself has therefore been given a form of shleimut, of completeness.

Chassidic teaching sees that completeness as more than a matter of arithmetic. A year containing the maximum number of days gives us an abundance of time, while its complete structure gives that time a sense of fullness and order. Chassidic thought connects such a year with an increase in shleimut both in quantity and in quality, describing the additional time as an expanded capacity for Torah, mitzvot, charity, kindness, and every dimension of our service of G’d.

A shanah shleimah consequently carries a blessing within its very structure, a year in which divine goodness can be revealed with greater fullness and in which the abundance of time becomes an abundance of opportunity for blessing to enter our lives. Health, prosperity, peace, learning, generosity, family, friendship, prayer, communal growth, and acts of kindness all have another measure of sacred time in which to flourish.

The year gives us 385 days, and those days give us the possibility of bringing more holiness into the lives we touch.

The connection becomes even more intriguing through the number itself. The numerical value of Sh'khinah, שְׁכִינָה, the Divine Presence, is 385, while safah, שָׂפָה, meaning “speech,” also has a numerical value of 385. Jewish mystical tradition associates the Sh'khinah with Divine speech, making the defining number of this year's calendar a fitting reminder that Divine Presence and human speech can become intertwined.

Words can carry blessing.

Words can transmit Torah, preserve memory, strengthen a person who needs encouragement, repair a relationship, teach a child, welcome a stranger, and give language to experiences that have not yet found their place within communal memory. A year whose number joins the Sh'khinah with speech therefore gives us an invitation to consider the sacred potential of what we say and how we use our voices.

For African-American Jews, that question carries a rich history.

Three days before Rosh Hashanah in 1963, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed by white supremacists, killing Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Denise McNair and injuring more than twenty others. The church stood at the center of Black religious and civic life in Birmingham and had served as a gathering place for the Civil Rights Movement.

Sixteen years earlier, Rabbi Jacob M. Rothschild had stood before his congregation in Atlanta on Rosh Hashanah with a call to the Jewish community to recognize its moral responsibility. 

Rothschild did not merely speak, he used his pulpit to say what needed to be said when saying it was neither easy nor popular. In his 1947 Rosh Hashanah sermon, he denounced segregation, argued for integration, and called on the Jewish community to support racial equality, beginning a rabbinic commitment to racial justice that would continue throughout his life. He continued that work alongside Atlanta's Christian clergy, helping build interracial relationships and shaping the 1957 Ministers' Manifesto. In 1958, white supremacists responded by bombing his synagogue, a prelude to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing just five years later.

Those moments belong to histories larger than either one of them, yet their proximity to Rosh Hashanah gives us reason to remember the relationship between sacred time and sacred speech. Jewish history contains generations of people who entered the New Year by asking what kind of world their words and deeds would help create. African-American history contains generations who gathered in sacred spaces, raised their voices, taught their children, organized their communities, and insisted upon the dignity of Black life.

African-American Jewish life carries both histories.

Our presence within Jewish life brings another dimension to the Jewish story, one in which Black identity and Jewish identity exist together in the same person, the same family, the same community, and the same sacred calendar. The history of African-American Jews includes our own prayers, institutions, complexities, celebrations, memories, and contributions, alongside the broader histories of both Black America and the Jewish people.

That makes the beginning of 5787 particularly appropriate.

Shabbat asks us to enter sacred time through rest.

Rosh Hashanah asks us to enter a new year through renewal.

The shanah shleimah gives us the greatest possible measure of time in which to live that renewal.

And the number 385 joins the Divine Presence with human speech.

The pieces belong together.

This makes 5787 a year to approach with confidence and expectation, trusting that the fullness built into the calendar can become fullness in our own lives and communities. We have more days in which to learn, more days in which to give, more days in which to build, more days in which to strengthen relationships, more days in which to pray, more days in which to welcome people into Jewish life, and more days in which to make the holiness we experience in synagogue visible in the world beyond it.

A complete year can become a year of complete service, of complete generosity, of complete joy, a year in which blessings that have remained hidden find fuller expression.

May we receive that time as a gift of blessing, fill it with Torah and kindness, use our words to strengthen rather than diminish, and allow the holiness with which the year begins to accompany us through every one of its 385 days.

May the Divine Presence dwell within our speech, our homes, our learning, and our communities.

May African-American Jewish life continue to grow in strength, joy, dignity, and wholeness.

May this shanah shleimah bring the fullest revelation of health, prosperity, peace, and goodness to our people.

And may a year that begins with Shabbat become a year in which the holiness of that first day remains with us through every day that follows.

Shabbat Shalom and Shanah Tovah Um’tuqah!