All Sevens Are Precious
Rosh Hashanah, as the beginning of the seventh month, expresses the need to find meaning and purpose in all that preceded Rosh Hashanah. All of our last year’s good deeds resemble a cacophony of disparate notes and musical sounds. Rosh Hashanah is the Maestro who unites them into one beautiful symphony. All the good of the past year can then be tapped for their maximum spirituality and effectiveness.
New Year – Seventh Month?
Everybody knows Rosh Hashanah as the Jewish New Year. It is therefore startling to many that the Torah refers to this Holy Day, as “the first day of the seventh month.” Why would Rosh Hashanah, which means head of the year, occur in the year’s seventh month?
To clarify this enigma, let us dwell for a moment on the significance of the number seven in Jewish thought. The Midrash declares: “all sevens are precious.”
To better understand the significance of seven, a discussion of the Shabbos, the most famous of the “sevens,” is in order. For six days a person can contribute to society and yet feel unfulfilled. Shabbos enables us to withdraw from our work and view our accomplishments from a different perspective, by seeing them in their cumulative state, thereby deriving pleasure from them. The Shabbos is the day that validates our entire week.
What is true of the Shabbos is also true of Moses, the seventh generation from Abraham. Abraham was the first person to publicly proclaim the belief in one G-d and the values of justice and righteousness. The objective of Abraham’s life’s work was only realized during the seventh generation, when Moses liberated Abraham’s progeny from Egypt, gave them the Torah and then built the Mishkan – the portable Tabernacle, or, Sanctuary – to facilitate G-d’s dwelling among the Jews, Then Abraham’s legacy was made real and permanent.
The number seven, thus, in Judaism represents, completing a cycle, bringing unity, fulfillment and meaning to an idea.
The First Month
The first month of the year, according to the Torah, is the month of Nissan, at which time G-d “descended” to extricate the Jewish nation out of Egyptian bondage and depravity. The Jews, our sages tell us, were not ready to be liberated. Centuries of slavery and assimilation took their toll.
This choice G-d made to unilaterally liberate the Jewish people despite their lack of worthiness, appeared arbitrary and without merit.
Only the “seventh month” season of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot, when Jews proclaim their acceptance of G-d as their King and return to Him with all their hearts, lends legitimacy to G-d’s selection of the Jews during the month of Nissan.
Rosh Hashanah, thus, as the beginning of the seventh month, expresses the need to find meaning and purpose in all that preceded Rosh Hashanah. All of our last year’s good deeds resemble a cacophony of disparate notes and musical sounds. Rosh Hashanah is the Maestro who unites them into one beautiful symphony. All the good of the past year can then be tapped for their maximum spirituality and effectiveness.
We are the Seventh Generation
The Rebbe – from the day he assumed leadership of the Chabad movement in 1951 – declared that we are the seventh generation since the founding of the Chabad Chassidic movement, whose objective it was to disseminate G-dly teaching to the world, to pave the way for the future Redemption.
Accordingly, the Rebbe informed us repeatedly, that we were given the unique capacity to complete the task of making the world a dwelling place for G-d in a way that eluded even our more illustrious forebears.
The challenge of being the seventh generation is to bring cohesiveness and meaning to all of what preceded us. As the Rebbe declared, “our generation is the last generation of exile and [will be] the first generation of Redemption.”
May we all be inscribed for a good and sweet year
From the book Light from the Future: Rosh Hashanah by Rabbi Heschel Greenberg, published by the Jewish Discovery Center.
