The Head of the Year
I recently asked a group of growth-oriented women what Rosh Hashana brought to mind. The answer, almost across the board, was menu planning, how to elevate our Yuntif tables to make it special. We spend a lot of time on Rosh Hashana eating and davening which are important aspects of the day as well as anointing Hashem as our personal king, but this year, not the menu and not even the davening but the name itself, Rosh Hashana, made me stop and think. If the Torah calls this holiday Yom Teruah, why do we call it Rosh Hashana?
A Cry With No Instructions
In the Torah, this day is named for an outcry. Looking closely at the sources in Vayikra and Bamidbar, the day is defined by a wordless sound. No instrument is specified. No melody. No prescribed count of notes to be sounded. Certainly nothing about the hundred blasts of tekiah, shevarim, teruah we know today.
Compare that to Pesach, anchored in yetzias Mitzrayim, the Exodus from Egypt, or Sukkos, explicitly tied to our years in the desert. Yom Teruah gets no such context. It’s defined solely by an action with the cry itself left completely unexplained.
Why?
Rav Soloveitchik wrote that tekias shofar is fundamentally a form of inarticulate prayer since words can never fully capture our innermost feelings, we move from verbal prayer to the wordless cry of the shofar, a sound more powerful than any words could be. A teruah is an outcry that can’t be scripted. It has to come from wherever a person actually is. The Torah leaves the meaning of the cry to us. Every year, we hear the same wordless shofar, and every year we fill it with our own personal reality whatever this year actually held. Is that enough?
Why “Head” and Not “Start”
The Rabbis gave us other names too like Yom Hazikaron, the Day of Remembrance, and Yom Hadin, the Day of Judgment, each one helping to bridge the gap between that raw, wordless cry and the life we’re actually trying to live. The shofar’s blast is a sudden honest wakeup call, these names ask us to be deliberate about what comes next: to turn a moment of raw sound into real introspection, and real introspection into ownership of where we’re heading this year.
But of all these names, one stuck, the one the Mishna itself uses as the name of the whole tractate: Rosh Hashana.
Not “the start of the year.” The head of the year. A head isn’t just the first point on a timeline. It’s where consciousness lives, where the nervous system that runs the entire body is centered. Rosh Hashana works the same way, it’s the spiritual command center that sets the direction and energy for everything that follows.
Putting It All Together
The Yom Teruah aspect of the day gives us the inspiration and honesty of our innermost feelings that we can’t put into words. The Rosh Hashana aspect gives us architecture and structure. A cry can move us for a moment, but without something to anchor it, it fades before it becomes anything lasting. Rosh Hashana doesn’t stand alone on the calendar. It’s embedded in a sequence with the preparation of Elul beforehand, the Ten Days of Repentance after, culminating in Yom Kippur and then Sukkos. Even the order of the shofar blasts, even the structure of Mussaf with its themes of Kingship, Remembrance, and Shofar all exist to give our raw cry somewhere to go.
Together, Yom Teruah and Rosh Hashana turn a moment of feeling into a year of real, actionable growth.
Kesiva Vachasima Tova — may we all be inscribed and sealed for a good and sweet year.
Reader’s Reflection
This year, as the shofar sounds, what are you doing to turn a Yom Teruah moment of experiencing the abstract shofar sounds into a refined personal introspection that challenges you to take personal ownership of your own trajectory for the coming year?