Day of the Lord
It is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year of 5786, or MMMMM.DCC.LXXXVI in Roman numerals, since I don’t know how to get a vinculum (overline) in this typesetting programme, and Donald Knuth doesn’t take emails. It is the first of the High Holidays, a day for sounding the ram’s horn, or shofar — to “Blow Up the Trumpet in Zion,” as we used to sing in Anglican. Henry Purcell’s glorious anthem was, however, written less than thirty-five decades ago. Some things are recent, some things are not.
For us — the people of God, and the Christians also in succession to the Jews — the Hebrew Yom Teruah is a prophecy of judgement, a call to repentance and thus of preparation for the life to come. In our seasonal calendar it falls near Michaelmas — the feast of Saint Michael and All Angels — the day on which fall terms used to begin. It is indeed a day of divine glory, but of ends as well as beginnings. That is the curious thing about the biblical revelation. The Bible — three-quarters of which is Old Testament — tells a story with a beginning, middle, and end. It does not, like other official texts, drone on forever, but has been thorough all the same, omitting trivialities. It makes us familiar with the boundaries of Heaven and Hell in this fallen world, and with the presence of angels and demons. The trumpet blast is, too, the sound of our warning.
The many — apparently millions — who are coming to the faith for the first time, in America and around the world, in light of the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk, have intuited that something is expected of them. Religion is not just another consumer purchase. The call to church and synagogue can and should be, rather, a new beginning.
As a politician much better than America deserves might add, “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”