The Secrets of Rosh Hashanah

Neither new year nor courtroom

Two ideas have to fall before anything else. The first is that Rosh Hashanah is the new year. It falls in the seventh month of the Hebrew calendar, so it opens no year at all.

The second is more serious: that there is a heavenly court where the Creator decides who is forgiven and who is punished. Kabbalah teaches that the Force we call the Creator presides over no court whatsoever.

And there is a third point Billy Phillips insists on repeating, because centuries of habit have buried it: this is not the technology of one people alone. Rav Berg spent decades hammering it home. It is universal, and it was created for the benefit of all humanity.

The law of the boomerang

Rosh Hashanah rests on a single law, and it is the one physics already knows: for every action there is a reaction. For every cause, an effect. Nothing more than that, and that is already a great deal.

Every word we speak, every action we take, is a boomerang thrown into the cosmos. And on Rosh Hashanah they all come back at once, the positive ones and the negative ones too.

Notice the reach: the return happens to all humanity in this period, whether people perceive it or not, whether they believe it or not.

The Creator neither punishes nor rewards

This is perhaps the greatest confusion of all. There is one Force, one source of energy for the entire cosmos, in the same way that there is one electrical current running through your house at this moment. That Force is only good, positive, infinitely compassionate.

Electricity enriches your life and powers everything you plug in. And if you put your finger in the socket, it can also kill you. The nature of electricity did not change in either case. It would be absurd to say that the electricity punished you.

In the same way, the Light of the Creator never punishes us. We are the ones who choose to put a finger in the socket, knowingly or not.

The crimes that do not look like crimes

Negative activity shows up on large and small scales, and the small ones are those that escape us. Billy Phillips revisits three of them.

Murder. We can kill someone physically, and also emotionally or spiritually. We can murder a body, and also a reputation. Kabbalah teaches that shedding blood is not limited to physical violence: it includes the shame and embarrassment we cause, when the blood rises to the face of someone we humiliate out of our own insecurity.

Evil speech. Any form of gossip, even about someone we have never met, is among the gravest things a person can do. In speaking badly of others we damage their lives, our own, and the whole world. Karen Berg puts it better than anyone:

Adultery. It is not limited to affairs. Coveting another person's business, their children, their possessions, is the same root. Envy appears when we stop appreciating everything we already have.

The Zohar, the liver and cholesterol

Here is the passage that astonishes, because it was written two thousand years ago. The Zohar teaches that our reactive emotions, above all anger, intolerance and impatience, manifest in the liver.

And the Zohar continues, saying that this bile dominates the arteries of the heart and all the arteries of the limbs of the body.

Now notice the detail. It is the liver that secretes bile. And the main component of bile is cholesterol. Medical science only discovered in recent decades that high cholesterol hardens and blocks the arteries, and that this is one of the most frequent causes of heart disease.

The Zohar was already saying, two millennia earlier, that anger and self-centred behaviour go straight to the liver, which then produces what dominates the arteries of the heart.

Every relationship is an artery

The idea reaches far beyond the body. Hardening of the arteries means, at bottom, blockages that stop something from flowing. And that happens in every territory of life.

A marriage is an artery. When it clogs, love and passion stop circulating between two people, and that is a marital heart attack. A friendship is an artery. So are our businesses: the money that reaches us travels through them, and when they are obstructed prosperity does not get through.

Billy Phillips makes an uncomfortable and honest observation: someone who cheats in business may well see those blockages end up in the physical arteries of their own body. You prosper by the crooked road, and you pay with bypass surgery.

Between people, between partners, between siblings, between parents and children, between one nation and another: all of them are metaphysical arteries, and every one of them clogs when we act with intolerance.

The shofar is technology, not tradition

Almost everyone associates the sounding of the shofar with a tradition, a ceremonial act of commemoration. Billy Phillips is categorical: nothing could be further from the truth. The ancient kabbalists had no interest in symbols or in blind ritual. They were technologists.

The image he uses comes from missile defence. The judgements coming back are like heat-seeking missiles finding their target. And the targets are us, or more precisely the blockages we installed in ourselves over the course of the year.

The shofar does not shoot the missiles down. It does better: it removes the targets themselves. The sound works like a spiritual laser, an ultrasound that dissolves the blockages, the same way an ultrasound dissolves a kidney stone. With no target, the missiles pass overhead and carry on.

The other image is a courtroom where the prosecutor holds every piece of evidence against you, and where the sound of the shofar destroys each one. Case closed.

And there is a technical reason the shofar works this way, held in the shape of the instrument and in a code of two Hebrew letters. That is the deepest secret of all, and it belongs to Yom Kippur.

Rosh means head

Here is the key that reorganises everything. Rosh means head. Rosh Hashanah is not the new year: it is the head of the year, the seed.

Just as the seed of an apple produces an apple tree, a negative seed produces a negative year, and a positive seed produces a positive year. And just as the head governs the whole body, this day governs the whole twelve months. The more we work to remove our negative traits, the more positive energy we inject into that seed.

The shofar confirms the code. It is a ram's horn, taken from the head of the animal. And the ram is the sign of Aries, the Hebrew month of Nissan, which is the true new year. In other words: we do connect to the new year, but at the level of the seed.

And there is a final detail that closes the circle. The date of the first of Tishrei is encoded in the first word of the Torah, Beresheet. Rearranged, its letters form the expression "first of Tishrei".