The Feast of Trumpets takes place on the first day of the seventh month with the Day of Atonement occurring on the tenth day. This ten day period is a time of preparation and repentance and may involve fasting and study of the Torah. This year Rosh Hashanah was celebrated on 17 September and Yom Kippur on 26 September.
If you read this blog on a regular basis you might have picked up that I occasionally run. On one of my September runs, back from a local park, I noticed a group of people gathered beside a lake reading from a book. Given their location and their dress it was obvious that they were Jewish.
It was not until a few weeks later when I was preparing for Leviticus that I came across a paragraph that explained that on or around Rosh Hashanah it is customary to visit a body of water containing fish and recite a specific prayer - in which the people symbolically cast away their sins in order to start the new year anew (Rosh Hashanah is Jewish New Year). This recalls God's promise in Micah 7:9 that God will cast all our sins into the depth of the sea.
In preparing for this talk I began to think about Lent - which is for Christians traditionally a time of reflection and preparation in the run up to Good Friday and Easter Sunday - remembering the death of Jesus and celebrating the resurrection. But it is a tradition that is more evident in some parts of the church. The Bible does not talk about Lent and therefore it has no place in some church traditions. But in doing away with Lent I wonder if we've not thrown the baby out with the bath water. Anyway - that's something I'm thinking about at the moment. What do you do for Lent?
