As we said in EmunahSpeak: A Real Deal Teshuva-part two, In Elul you are what you want to be. You are the sum total of all the aspirations and kavanas you have for growth in the ensuing year. During the rest of the year, however, you are what you do on a daily basis…
What better time to go back and review the progress we have (hopefully) made on the tearful resolutions we accepted upon ourselves in Elul, in the run up to the Yom HaDin, then in the aftermath of January 1st. The rest of the country is recovering from its collective hangover awash in the tens of millions resolutions that were dead on arrival.
It’s bad enough that the same old same old has its fingerprints all over their new year. It shouldn’t also be calcifying the good machshovas that we had in relation to our new year when we took on to improve ourselves in a myriad of ways each according to his capacity and temperament.
But over and above our individual spiritual successes and failings, the calendar demands that at this time of the year we also make somewhat of a cheshbon as to what distinguishes our New Year from theirs. More often than not, we tend to view it in terms of our resolution as to the future versus their dissolution in the present, but this is not a satisfying comparison because, after all, their new year is not a Yom HaDin, it’s a day of celebration. And how else should goyim celebrate, if not to drink themselves into oblivion?
But as Rabbi Leib Kelemen tells us, there’s more to it than we pray and they drink. A lot more.
He lets us know that way back when, during the hey day of the Roman Empire, the contrast between our way of kicking off the New Year and theirs was a bit more pronounced. It seems that excessive drinking was a daily staple rather than a once a year exercise in exuberance, so something more was needed to create that proper yom tovdik atmosphere, le’havdil.
So they closed the courts for a week.
With the courts closed, the City of Rome was a hefker velt with neither law nor authority. Any girl foolish enough to be found outside was fair game with no legal recourse. And who’s to say that this closing of the courts of law was not a direct response to the Yom HaDin (our New Year), when the whole world, including Rome, was being judged? It’s as if the Romans said: We want no part of your Yom HaDin, or the judgment’s of your G-D. And then they conveyed their contempt by closing the courts on their new year.
Don’t be fooled by the drinking.
It wasn’t the bottom line of what their new year was all about. It only fueled it.
In light of what we have been taught concerning the origins of the new year celebration in the Western world, it all comes down to this: The proper distinction between our New Year and theirs is not the juxtaposition of the Yom HaDin and the Yom HaHefker, but rather the Yom HaDin and the Yom HaDinless.
