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Hayom harat olam. We usually translate it as: “Today the world is born.” It is a lovely phrase, and not quite what the Hebrew says. Harat means conceived, pregnant or gestating. The world of Rosh Hashanah has not arrived neatly packaged. It is still becoming.
That feels like a useful distinction this year.
We often talk about hope as though it means believing everything will turn out well. There is not much in Jewish history or, frankly, in the news to justify that belief. Jewish hope is less comfortable than optimism. It begins with the refusal to accept that the world as it is must be the world as it remains.
Hannah Arendt called our human capacity to begin again “natality”. Because we are born, she argued, we are able to introduce something new and unexpected into the world. Rosh Hashanah makes a related claim, although on a cosmic scale. Creation is not an event safely contained in the first chapter of Genesis. It is unfinished business, and we are caught up in it.
This is both hopeful and slightly inconvenient. We cannot simply wait for a better world to turn up.
The High Holy Days move us from possibility to responsibility. The Mishnah teaches that on Rosh Hashanah “all creatures pass before God” (Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 1:2). The image is of each life being seen and considered. It asks us to consider ourselves, too. What have we become used to? Where have we stopped paying attention? Which explanations have become excuses?
Yom Kippur gives us a language with which to answer. Its confessions are all in the plural: we have betrayed, we have acted violently, we have gone astray. This is not a claim that everyone is equally responsible for every wrong. It is a recognition that none of us lives alone. We are shaped by families, communities and institutions; we also help to shape them.
Then, almost before we have recovered, Judaism sends us outside to build a hut.
The succah is a peculiar answer to our desire for security. Its walls are temporary and its roof must let in the weather. It offers no fantasy of invulnerability. Instead, it asks whether we can still create welcome, beauty and joy when we know how fragile life is.
The same passage of Mishnah that pictures humanity passing before God on Rosh Hashanah says that on Succot the world is judged for water. It is an unexpectedly practical detail. Without water, nothing grows; without rain, there is no harvest to celebrate.
At the very moment we gather in the fruits of our labour, the tradition reminds us how much was never ours to control.
That is the wisdom of the succah. It does not ask us to feel secure because nothing bad can happen. Nor does it suggest that our efforts are pointless because so much lies beyond us. We build what shelter we can. We invite people in. We eat, talk and celebrate beneath a roof through which we can still see the sky.
Succot is described in the liturgy as z’man simchateinu, the season of our joy. But this is not joy postponed until uncertainty has disappeared. It is joy practised in full knowledge that uncertainty never will. Perhaps that is why it follows Yom Kippur. Having acknowledged our limits, our failures and our dependence upon one another, we return to the ordinary work of living with gratitude, hospitality and, yes, pleasure.
Perhaps that is what hayom harat olam can offer us. Not the easy promise of a fresh start, but the more serious possibility that the future is not yet decided.
The world is still gestating. What is born next depends, at least in part, on what we are prepared to notice, repair and do differently. But Succot adds something essential: we cannot become so preoccupied with the world we hope to create that we fail to inhabit the one we already have. We are also commanded to eat, welcome, gather and rejoice. This is not the breezy optimism that everything will somehow be fine. It is hope grounded in responsibility, joined by the very Jewish insistence that, even while the work remains unfinished, there is life around us worth celebrating.
Rabbi Charley Baginsky is co-lead of the Movement for Progressive Judaism, progressivejudaism.org.uk