
Drawing From Time’s Wisdom
January 1st was triply special this year
We began a new secular year; observed Rosh Hodesh to bring in the Hebrew month of Tevet; and lit the final Hanukkah candle, closing out the holiday we celebrate by counting each one of its eight days. These three distinct units of time—year, month, day—all coalesced on the same date. Yet each represents a different approach to experiencing time, and offers us its own spiritual message.
At the stroke of midnight on Tuesday night, we flipped the calendar into 2025. In the accounting of years, time is linear—our individual lives and all of history move in only one direction: forward. Linear time can be spiritually scary for many of us—a reminder that our lives are finite, that once a moment passes, it cannot be recovered. Linear time is the time we waste, lose, save, and spend. It is the time of self-reflection that we engage in on Rosh Hashanah, and of New Year’s resolutions come January. It is the time of productivity and purpose. In the limited time that we have: What do we want to achieve? Who do we want to be? How do we want to live?
Earlier on Tuesday evening, as New Year’s revelers were getting ready for their parties, the month of Tevet began. Jewish months follow the lunar calendar, corresponding to the cycles of what Shakespeare famously described as “the inconstant moon, that monthly changes in her circled orb.” The moon is inconstant, yet it is constant in its inconstancy. New, crescent, quarter, gibbous, full, then waning through its phases to new again—each month returning to its original state. Cyclical time is the time of the natural world: the rising and setting sun, the waxing and waning moon, the seasons, the water cycle, flowers blooming then dying then becoming the soil that births new shoots. Cyclical time is the time of humility, a call to live with the understanding that we are part of something larger than ourselves, a universe that moves and changes through forces we did not create and do not control.
And Wednesday night began the eighth day of Hanukkah, one of several periods in the Jewish calendar when we are asked to explicitly count days. What is a day? When exactly does it begin and end? Our sages recognized that the precise moment that day becomes night or night turns to dawn is ambiguous, and gave religious meaning to this ambiguity. They decreed, for example, that Shabbat begins at sunset, the earliest edge of that liminal space between day and night—yet ends 25 hours later when the sky is fully dark. The sun rises and sets on its own, but the start and end of Shabbat were determined by the rabbis, and we continue to be the ones to delineate Shabbat from the rest of the week through prayer and ritual. In Judaism, the liminal time between day and night is made meaningful when the natural world is shaped into holiness by human hands.
Purpose, humility, and holiness. As we enter into the year 2025, the month of Tevet, and the day of Shabbat, may we draw from time’s wisdom to bring these qualities into our lives.
Shabbat shalom, hodesh tov, and happy new year,
Rabbi Shuli Passow