The first thing we notice is that it is “the first day of the seventh month.” The number seven, especially when applied to time, always signifies holiness. The first thing declared holy in the Torah is the seventh day, Shabbat (Gen. 2:1–3). The seventh or “sabbatical” year is likewise holy. There is to be no work in the fields. The land is to enjoy rest. Debts are released. A similar provision applies to the fiftieth or Jubilee year (at the end of seven seven-year cycles) when, in addition, most ancestral land returned to its original owners. The seventh month fits this pattern. It is to the year what Shabbat is to the week, the sabbatical to a cycle of years, and the Jubilee to an era. It is holy time.

What is specific about the holiness of the seventh in a sequence of time is that it is marked by a cessation of work. It marks a period during which we cease creating and remember that we are creations. We stop making and remember that we are made. We, the universe and time itself are the work of a hand greater than merely human, greater in fact than anything we can conceive. On the seventh, be it day, month or year, we focus our attention on God the Creator of all. Rosh HaShana is a festival of creation.

No sooner have we said this than we see that in Judaism there is a dual structure of time, just as there is a unique duality in Judaism as a whole. On the one hand God is the Creator, who made heaven and earth and all that lives. But God is also the Redeemer who rescued His people from slavery in Egypt and led them through the wilderness to the Promised Land. He is the Revealer who appeared to the people at Mount Sinai, made a covenant with them, gave them laws, and from time to time sent them, through the prophets, His word.

God’s creation is universal. God’s redemption and revelation are particular to the people of Israel who, by their history and way of life, testify to His existence and involvement with the world. The two cycles of time in Judaism represent this duality. One cycle – Pesaĥ, Shavuot and Sukkot – is about redemption and revelation, about the way God acts in history through the shaping events of the Jewish people. The other – the seventh day, seventh month and seventh year – is about creation, God in relation to the cosmos as a whole.

This is the first insight into the meaning of the day. Rosh HaShana is a celebration of the universe as God’s work. The sages called it the anniversary of creation. This is the theme of the middle section of the Musaf Amida, Zikhronot, “Remembrances.” “You remember all of ­creation, and all things that were formed…for this day is the opening of all Your works, a remembrance of the very first day.” It is echoed in the prayer HaYom Harat Olam, “This day is the birth of the world.”

Because it is about creation and humanity, the prayers of Rosh HaShana have a universalism not shared by Pesaĥ, Shavuot and Sukkot. The central section of the Amida on those days begins with the words, “You have chosen us from among all peoples,” a declaration of Jewish chosenness. By contrast, in the Amida on Rosh HaShana we say, “And so place the fear of You…over all that You have made,” an expression of complete universality. Pesaĥ, Shavuot and Sukkot are about what it is to be a Jew. Rosh HaShana is about what it is to be human.