Rosh Hashana: Coronation Night

Two elderly Jews who hadn’t seen each other in 50 years, met, slowly recognized one another and embraced. They went back to the apartment of one of them to talk about the days long ago.

The conversation went for hours. Night fell. One asked the other, “Look at your watch. What time is it?”

“I don’t have a watch,” said the second.

“Then look at the clock.”

“I don’t have a clock.”

“Then how do you tell the time?”

“You see that trumpet in the corner?” asked the second. “That’s how I tell the time.”

“You’re crazy,” said the first. “How can you tell the time with a trumpet?”

The second one picked up the trumpet, opened the window and blew a deafening blast. Thirty seconds later an angry neighbor shouted, “Two thirty in the morning, and you’re playing the trumpet?” The man turned to his friend and said, “You see? That’s how you tell the time with a trumpet!”

“Coronation Night” – that is how one of the great spiritual masters would define the night of Rosh Hashanah.

In a 1974 sermon, Rabbi Yosef Dov Soleveitchik (1903-1993), one of the great Jewish thinkers of the past century, related that when he was a young child learning in cheder (Jewish day school) in the Russian village of Chaslavitch in the days preceding Rosh Hashanah, he could recognize in his teacher an extraordinary sense of trepidation.

“Our teacher, who was a Chabad Chassid (disciple), said to us: ‘Do you know what Rosh Hashanah is? The Rebbe, the Tzemach Tzedek, would call the night of Rosh Hashanah ‘Karanatzia Nacht’ (‘Coronation Night’).

“Do you know whom we will be coronating?” the teacher asked the children.

The young Soleveitchik responded in jest: “Nicholas.” (This was a number of years before the 1917 Russian Revolution, when Nicholas still served as the Russian czar.)

The poor teacher of Chaslavitch responded: “Nicholas? He was coronated years ago. Why do we need to coronate him again? Besides, him?! He is not a real king. Tonight, my dear children, we coronate G-d…”

“And do you know who places the crown?” the teacher continued. “Yankel the tailor, Berel the shoemaker, Zalman the water-carrier, Yossel the painter, Dovid the butcher…”

Rabbi Soloveitchik concluded: “Over the years I have given many sermons and written many discourses on the concept of Rosh Hashanah, but nothing ever made me feel the true depth and power of the day as the words of my childhood teacher. Every year, when I recite in the Rosh Hashanah prayers the words, ‘Rule over the whole world in Your glory,’ I remember my teacher in Chaslavitch.”

How much of Judaism is compressed in this brief conversation between teacher and students? In a few words, a poverty-stricken Jewish teacher in a small shtetl (town) in Russia gave his 7-year-old students the core, the essence, the very marrow of Jewish existence, of Jewish thought.

Now, he needed not explain to them why they should marry Jewish girls, continue living as Jews and be proud of their Jewishness, as so many teachers and educators do today. It was more than obvious: Who would want to miss out on the opportunity of coronating G-d?

But why does G-d need us to coronate Him? If G-d created us, does He really need us to declare Him king? Isn’t He is the boss regardless?

And what does it mean that He is our king anyhow? Imagine you assemble one million ants and declare yourself king over them. When 50,000 of them then turn left instead of right, you kill them in an instant. Does that make you king over them? G-d gave us our entire existence; relative to Him we are far smaller and far less significant than an ant in the presence of a human. Can He then be said to be our king? Is that not an insult?

Yet here lay one of the great and daring ideas of Judaism. G-d, the perfect endless one, desired to be king not through power or by the dictates of nature. He desired to be chosen as king. G-d wanted a relationship with someone distinct from Him who would freely choose to construct a bond with Him.

So an infinite, omnipotent G-d suspends His infinity, suppresses His endlessness and conceals His omnipotence in order to allow space for an intelligent, independent and self-oriented human being who is then capable of choosing G-d as his or her king.

This, the spiritual masters explained, was the meaning of Rosh Hashanah, the day when the first human was created, the day when small, frail, vulnerable and lowly human beings invite G-d to serve as their King.

G-d could place His own crown on His head. He does not need us to do it. But then He would be a dictator, not a king; the relationship would be coerced, not chosen. So G-d waits all year for the moment for which the entire universe was created: when we coronate him as our king, when we create a paradigm shift from self-centeredness to G-d-centeredness.

Rosh Hashanah is the most moving day in the Jewish calendar. It embodies the ultimate meaning of human existence and the vulnerability of a G-d who linked His fate to man’s.

Happy Coronation Night.

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