Article published in Perfil Newspaper on September, 6th 2021

With this festivity, we promote the joy of living and maintaining life. We celebrate that God created the world and we are committed to taking care of it and keeping it standing.

Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year. It refers to the date that God created the universe. We evoke his creation as his will. With this festivity, we promote the joy of living and maintaining life. We celebrate that God created the world and we are committed to taking care of it and keeping it standing.

This festivity also has other names: “Yom Hadín” (“Judgment Day”), “Yom Hazicarón” (“Remembrance Day”) and “Yom Teruá” (“Day of the sound of the Shofar”). Each one is related to a different facet of this day, but they all have one component in common: the search for justice through the renewal of human conscience.

The first of the names is Yom Hadin, “Judgment Day.” According to Jewish tradition, one of the seven universal precepts, which apply to all humanity, is to establish Courts of Justice that apply the laws so that peace prevails in society.

To achieve the noble goal of a fair society, there must be fair rules and people willing to put them into practice and enforce them. The courts, security forces, government, legislators and unions, among other sectors that are at the service of society, must be recognized for their nobility, wisdom, courage and honesty. They should never attempt to influence them for their own personal or partisan benefit.

When justice is corrupted, when the people who should govern in the service of society care only for their own interest, the population loses confidence in institutions, people suffers and society is destroyed.

Justice, although it includes the law, is not reduced to it. Therefore, according to Judaism, justice is intrinsically related to social welfare policies. That is the reason why, social justice is not only a matter for the judges but also for the rulers on duty.

The Talmud tells cases in which, although the employer was right in a trial with his employee, the judge asked the employer to assist him because otherwise the employee would not be able to subsist. At the same time, Maimonides establishes that the greatest justice is to help people so that they have a job and do not need charity.

The scourge of social inequality, reflected in poverty and ignorance, due to the lack of correct strategies and policies, is as unfair as the lack of law. When material and cultural hardships become everyday, we are witnessing the failure of social justice.

On Rosh Hashanah, which is the day God created the world, we invoke God as the doer of justice. Because without justice the world cannot stand: creation alone is not enough, there must be justice for creation to last.

We become aware of the value of justice. God created the world in such a way that he needs a fair order to last in time: a society cannot be sustained in the long term if it is not maintained through justice.

From there the third name of this festivity arises, “Yom Hazicarón”, “Remembrance Day.” We remember who we are and what our virtues and vices are to establish a change strategy to improve as individuals and as a society, and in that way resolve the scourge of injustice. Without that balance and memory, there will be no improvement and we will slowly fall without realizing the weaknesses that lead us to corrupt ourselves.

“Yom Teruá”, “Day of the sound of the Shofar” is the fourth name of this festivity. The Shofar is an animal horn, a cry of nature, which sound, emitted on New Year’s Day, awakens  our numb  moral conscience to act with the objective that justice is the basic foundation of society.

The sound of the Shofar is an internal shaking, a pure natural sound, which tells us: Why do you act like this? Where are you? Where are you going? What are you trying to achieve? It reminds us of God’s eternal question to Adam and Eve, archetypes of humanity: “Aieka?”, “Where are you?”

The inner voice that nests in each one of us is a call to combat our self-destructive tendencies and avoid the degradation of humanity. This call is activated every year with the clamor of nature that is dying because of us, symbolized in the sound of the Shofar.

 We invoke God as Creator of the world (Rosh Hashanah, “New Year”) and doer of justice (Yom Hadin, “Judgment Day”), we awaken the sleeping conscience (Yom Teruá, “Day of the sound of the Shofar”) and we remember our actions, virtues and vices (Yom Hazicarón, “Remembrance Day”) to face a society with social justice that does not get destroyed.

 We hope that after this Rosh Hashanah we can find inspiration for a path that leads us to justice and allows us to find the long-awaited social peace.

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