I no longer stay up late on New Year’s Eve. The Times Square ball can drop without me. But I watch with amazement as so much of the world descends into a sort of drunkenfest – and at inflated prices that can put you into debt. Most cultures have some sort of new year’s bash: The Chinese new year, for instance, with fireworks, dragon dances, and literally painting the town red. We Jews direct our energies into eating and praying – but we make loud noises on the shofar, and we consume enough honey to keep dentists busy for the rest of the year.
The rationale behind it all is unclear. History of Religion expert Mircea Eliade considered it an outgrowth of ancient peoples’ desire to take refuge in a primeval moment when the connection between ourselves and the gods was patent. Well, maybe. Traditional cultures may revert to God-intoxicated founding moments, but the Times Square crowd is just plain intoxicated.
So perhaps New Year celebrations fortify us as we face the uncertainty of a new year. Judaism famously warns that “All beginnings are difficult” (Mekhilta to Exodus 19:5). And there may be something to that. Google “Beginnings are hard,” and you find a ton of people in agreement. All sorts of examples come to mind: moving to a new school; starting a new job; embarking on a new relationship; undertaking a new project; writing that first line of a school essay.
But I tend to think the opposite. Hard as beginnings may be, endings are usually harder. Making new friends, though difficult, is easier than saying goodbye to old ones. Starting your first job is easier than retiring. Declaring a war is nothing compared to ending it. Moving in with (you hope) the love of your life may have its uncertainties, but the pain is in moving out. I know nothing about what it feels like to be born into the world, but I suspect that dying is harder.
We might conclude that New Year merriment anesthetizes us against the pain of closing the book on the year gone by. But that doesn’t seem right either. I, for one, cannot wait to reclassify 2024 under “Files, Old (Good Riddance).” So the problem with endings is not so much making them happen, but making them happen the right way. Divorces are hard but they can sometimes be amicable; there are even such things as good deaths rather than bad ones.
A more likely theory, then, is that endings can be positive – if we have reason to believe that they will be followed by a beautiful new beginning. Losing a job is okay if you have a better one lined up. Falling out of love is acceptable if you’ve met the next new flame who will be lovelier. Even dying is less painful if you think you are slated for some heavenly afterlife.
Endings and beginnings are apparently intertwined. The metaphor of life as a journey works rather nicely. We don’t mind being ever on the move as we age, so long as our leaving one place portends our finding another one. What we dread is the flat earth phenomenon: coming to an end with nothing left to do but fall off the cliff into nothingness.
Noisy New Year celebrations convince us that the earth isn’t flat; that we can step boldly into a new unknown with assurance that we will land on solid ground; say goodbye to the old because the new will be better. Mind you, there is little evidence to support that hypothesis. Coming off a bad old year and anticipating a new and better one is like suffering some chronic illness for 365 days, but having well-wishers assure you that tomorrow you will be cured. It doesn’t always work out that way. But we cannot long subsist without hope. And, come to think of it, who knows?
The old doesn’t actually die with the new; more likely it persists, like a ghost who visits us nightly no matter how much we try to shake it off. When toxic relationships expire, the toxicity can still linger. We are still dealing with the aftereffects of Covid lockdowns. We yearn for the certainty that painful endings will at least end, so that we can launch a new beginning, unsullied by the past.
That may be what the madness of New Year’s Eve is intended to convey. Out with the old and in with the new. As 2024 becomes 2025, we want so much to have the pain of the past dispelled; and the hope for the future confirmed.
This year, particularly, so much is at stake. Will the Israel-Gaza war finally come to an end – a real end, that provides Israelis with security; and also sows the seeds of betterment both for Israel and its neighbors? And what of Ukraine? The new administration seems bent on ending the war there. But how, and at what cost? Will democracy survive here at home? Will anti-Semitism increase or decline?
The more terrible things are, the more we wish they would end. But what makes those things so terrible is precisely their immunity to solutions. Declaring a “New Year” may be fun for a day, but the day after, we all go back to work; January 2 won’t look all that different from December 31; which suggests that the Jewish idea of making New Year a day for prayer is not all that wrong. At the very least, it is a healthy reminder of reality’s persistent intransigence.
So here’s to 2025: a prayer. May it arrive with more wisdom than folly. May the suffering of 2024 come finally to an end. May freedom, health and happiness be abundant, and for everyone. May our worst nightmares find no footing, while our happy dreams take root and become reality. Amen.
Will things really work out that way? Probably not, but maybe just a little, and maybe more than we think possible. The start of a new year is at least the time to imagine them.
Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, Ph.D. 