New year, wrong season

Everything about Rosh Hashanah assumes autumn. Apples and honey, the harvest safely in, a year winding down towards winter.

Then you step out of shule into an Australian September, where the wattle is out, the evenings are stretching, and the whole country is heading the other way.

Congregants have raised the mismatch with Rabbi Yaakov Glasman of Melbourne’s St Kilda Shule “multiple times over the years”, he says.

Pesach is usually where the penny drops: “It is called the Festival of Spring, yet here it arrives in autumn.”

Rosh Hashanah carries the same imported assumptions.

Succot, a fortnight later, is named the Festival of Gathering after a harvest that has never once been gathered in Melbourne, Sydney or Perth in September.

The whole festival cycle was built on the farming year of ancient Israel, and Australian Jews brought it south intact.

But it is not as though the local spring has nothing to offer. Early September is peak flowering for golden wattle, the national floral emblem, and the banksias are carrying the honey-scented spikes that had early settlers calling them Australian honeysuckle.

Sweetness, renewal, colour: all of it right there for the borrowing, although none of it has made its way into the liturgy or onto the table.

Some Australian Jews have decided the accident of geography works in our favour. Writing for SBS Voices in 2020, Roz Bellamy called the southern spring “the ideal timing for a festival about forgiveness, second chances, change and growth”, describing wattle coming out along her local creek and people emerging from months of hibernation just as the Days of Awe ask them to turn and change.

On that reading, the mismatch could be seen as a gift, with a festival of return landing in the one season already built for it.

Rabbi Glasman sees the same thing from the pulpit.

“You walk outside and see blossoms and the beginning of longer days which makes us feel a real sense of new life beginning,” he says.

“My mind naturally connects with the themes of renewal, hope and making a fresh start which are very much connected with the High Holy Days.”

The prayers themselves, he says, “follow their own spiritual rhythm and come from a very different climate”.

A sermon is a different animal. It has to speak to the people in the pews, so he reaches for what is happening outside, in the garden and in the world.

He is wary, though, of the tidy theory that the festivals shed their agricultural meaning when the Temple fell and pilgrimage ended.

Prayer and reflection became more central, he agrees, but the farming year was never written out of the calendar.

“Rosh Hashanah is far less focused on agriculture than Pesach, Shavuot or Succot, but it still belongs to a calendar shaped by the land of Israel,” he says.

“The meaning developed over time rather than the older meaning simply disappearing.”

As for whether spring suits the season of teshuvah better than autumn ever did, he will go halfway.

“Spring gives you a very clear picture of renewal. The world feels fresh, things are growing again and there is a sense of possibility in the air. That fits beautifully with teshuvah and the idea that a person can change direction.”

But he is not about to rewrite the festival around the weather.

Rosh Hashanah, he says, is “primarily about judgement and introspection, taking a good, hard look at ourselves”, and those themes run deeper than any season.

Should the calendar ever bend to where Jews actually live? Glasman is firm that it should not.

A shared calendar “gives Jews everywhere a shared rhythm and keeps us connected to the land at the centre of Jewish history”, he says.

Halachah does make room for geography when it has no choice.

Communities near the Arctic Circle, where the sun barely rises or barely sets for months at a stretch, have needed rabbinic rulings just to work out when Shabbat begins and how a fast day ends.

“The Torah aims to preserve the shared calendar while allowing Jewish life to function practically in very different places,” Glasman says.

Which leaves Australian Jews roughly where they have always been. Nobody has moved Rosh Hashanah to March. Nobody dips wattle blossom in honey.

The festival arrives when the Hebrew calendar says it arrives, out of step with the garden and in step with every other Jewish community on earth, which is presumably the point.

“Spring can strengthen the message,” Glasman says, “but in no way does it define the festival.”