In Israel, you don’t celebrate Rosh Hashanah. You live it.

This is what happens when the Jewish calendar becomes the rhythm of an entire country.

photo: Nechama Lock/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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There is something peculiar about celebrating Rosh Hashanah outside Israel.

You can spend hours in synagogue declaring that a new year has begun. You can hear the shofar, recite ancient prayers, eat apples dipped in honey, wish everyone shanah tovah, and contemplate the year that has passed.

Then you walk outside — and nothing has changed.

The traffic is the same. The stores are open. Your coworkers are answering emails. Children are sitting in classrooms. The television is discussing whatever it was discussing yesterday.

According to Judaism, an entire year has ended and another has begun. According to almost everyone around you, it is just another day in September. That may be the single biggest difference between celebrating Rosh Hashanah in the Diaspora and celebrating it in Israel.

In Israel, you do not merely observe Rosh Hashanah. You live inside it. The country begins preparing weeks beforehand. Supermarkets fill with honey, pomegranates, dates, and holiday baskets. Businesses invite their employees to a new year’s toast. Offices begin asking who is going where for the chag. Families negotiate the complicated annual diplomacy of whose parents are hosting which meals.

People who have not entered a synagogue all year suddenly become super-Jews.

Television programs look back at the year that was. Newspapers publish end-of-year reflections. Politicians deliver new year messages. Soldiers get ready to go home. Roads fill with families heading to grandparents and cousins.

The Jewish year does not remain inside the synagogue. It spills into the street. And that is more historically remarkable than we usually appreciate.

For nearly 2,000 years, Jews lived according to two clocks: There was Jewish time, and there was everyone else’s time. The surrounding civilization decided when the workweek began, when the year ended, which holidays closed schools, which festivals transformed storefronts, and which dates carried national meaning.

And then, quietly beneath that calendar, Jews maintained another one — Tishrei, Nisan, Shavuot, Sukkot, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah.

A Jewish family might celebrate the beginning of a new year while the city outside barely noticed. Jews could declare a holy day while their neighbors went to work. They could proclaim that history had reached one of its great spiritual moments while the civilization around them continued uninterrupted.

There was something beautiful about that stubbornness, but there was also something lonely about it.

The modern State of Israel changed the relationship between Jews and time. It did not merely create a place where Jews could practice Judaism freely. Jews had practiced Judaism in countless places before. Israel did something much stranger: It created a society in which Jewish time became public time.

Calendars are not neutral. They tell us which civilization we inhabit. Consider how deeply a society is shaped by its calendar. December changes much of the Western world even for people who are not Christian. Streets change. Music changes. Shopping changes. Vacation schedules change. Schools close. Families travel. Television changes. Airports change. Office parties appear.

You do not have to believe in Christmas to know that Christmas has arrived. The culture tells you.

Rosh Hashanah in Israel works the same way. You do not have to be religious to know that Tishrei has arrived. The country tells you.

That may explain one of the most beautiful contradictions of Israeli life: Some Israelis who would describe themselves as completely secular nevertheless live profoundly Jewish lives without always realizing it. They speak Hebrew. Their weekends revolve around Shabbat. (The Israeli workweek is Sunday to Thursday.) Their children learn extensively about Judaism, Zionism, and Israel in public schools. They plan vacations around Passover and Sukkot. They complain about how early everything closes before a holiday. They argue about where to have the Rosh Hashanah meals.

They may never think of any of this as religious, and perhaps it isn’t. It is something larger: It is civilization.

That is one of the things Israel teaches us about Judaism: Jewishness was never meant to exist only as a collection of religious rituals. It is a language, a calendar, a memory, a literature, a cuisine, a moral vocabulary, a family structure, a history and a way of organizing time.

Judaism is something you can practice, but Jewish civilization is something you can inhabit. Rosh Hashanah makes that distinction especially visible. In Los Angeles, London, or Sydney, a Jew usually has to enter Jewish space in order to experience the holiday. We go to synagogue, a Jewish community center, or to someone’s home. We create a small Jewish universe inside a much larger non-Jewish one.

Israel reverses the arrangement. The Jewish universe is already outside your door.

One Israeli may spend most of the day in synagogue. Another may go to the beach. Another may have a family dinner and nothing more. Another may barely think about God at all. But all of them know what day it is — and there is something extraordinary about that shared awareness.

Israeli society can be brutally divided, but as Rosh Hashanah approaches, millions of people who might agree on little else begin asking the same question: Where are you for the chag? For a brief moment, they are all standing inside the same story.

There is another dimension to Rosh Hashanah in Israel that is nearly impossible to reproduce elsewhere: The language itself comes home. Outside Israel, Hebrew often belongs to specifically Jewish moments. You hear it in synagogue. You read it in a prayer book. You say kiddush. You sing a Hebrew song. Then you return to English, French, Spanish, or whatever language organizes the rest of your life.

In Israel, the Hebrew of prayer exists alongside the Hebrew of ordinary life. The language in which Jews pray for another year of life is also the language in which someone argues with a parking attendant. The language of Isaiah is the language of WhatsApp. The language of the Torah is on highway signs. The words of the machzor do not sound like artifacts from a vanished civilization. They belong to the same linguistic world as menus, radio broadcasts, love letters, political arguments, children’s jokes, and supermarket receipts.

There is something absurd about it. You can spend the morning listening to ancient Hebrew prayers about the sovereignty of God and spend the afternoon hearing someone swear in Hebrew because another driver stole his parking space.

But that absurdity may be one of Zionism’s greatest accomplishments. Hebrew escaped the synagogue. It became alive again. And so did Jewish time.

This is why Rosh Hashanah in Israel can feel deeply Jewish even outside the walls of a synagogue. The holiness is not confined to prayer. Sometimes it is simply the feeling that an entire society is turning the page together. The phrase shanah tovah is everywhere. The year that is ending is discussed as a Jewish year. The year ahead is named according to the Jewish calendar. An ancient system of time that Jews carried from country to country, generation after generation, suddenly belongs to the public square again.

Outside Israel, Jewish continuity often becomes an intentional project. Parents ask how to give their children a Jewish identity. Communities worry about assimilation. Organizations create programs designed to keep young Jews connected. Families debate Hebrew school, Jewish summer camp, synagogue membership, Israel trips, and holiday observance.

All of these can be important, but notice what they are trying to accomplish: They are trying to make Jewishness strong enough to compete with the surrounding culture.

Israel changes the equation. A Jewish child in Israel does not need someone to explain that Rosh Hashanah belongs to him. His world already tells him that. School stops. The calendar changes. His family gathers. The rhythm of the country changes. He may grow up to become deeply religious. He may grow up secular. But he will not grow up believing that Rosh Hashanah is an obscure ritual practiced by his grandparents while the real world carries on without him.

And it is why Rosh Hashanah in Israel makes something visible that is easy to miss elsewhere. Israel did not only give Jews sovereignty over territory. It gave Jews sovereignty over time. For centuries, Jewish holidays were islands inside somebody else’s calendar. In Israel, the islands became the mainland.

Shanah tovah.

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