In Israel they call it Yom Sylvester. This translates as Sylvester’s day. Since the Jewish holidays serve for the default outline of Israeli national holidays, New Years was already taken (think Rosh Hashanah). The celebration of transitioning between gregorian years is instead named not for that hungry Looney Tunes cat but for Saint Sylvester, who is said to have died on December 31st. Yes, the Zionist pioneers named it for a Christian Saint, which is a little curious for the Jewish state. It seems that the early Jewish planners underestimated the number of Jews who would be interested in celebrating a foreign secular holiday. Given that we do, celebrate this day, I therefore wish you all a happy Yom Sylvester (and for good measure, happy New Years as well).
Along with joy, New Years often reels in our thoughts on what we would like to better accomplish for the coming year. While we call these New Years resolutions, psychologists sometimes see what’s happening as our working to conquer cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance, in psychology-speak, is when we have two conflicting thoughts and the difference between them causes us stress. Often, this difference is between thought and behavior. For example, when we are unhappy about the state of our health and believe we ought to be working out more often and yet we don’t, we have cognitive dissonance. When we are concerned about the strange weather phenomena and climate change and yet we do nothing to change our behavior to make some kind of difference, we call that cognitive dissonance. When we believe that we should have a better connection to God, or to Israel, and yet we do little to improve that connection, the feeling that results is cognitive dissonance.
The rabbis understood this concept, but phrased it differently— in Hebrew, actually. And in Hebrew, they wrote about the world as it is and the world as it ought to be: עולם הזה (olam hazeh), and עולם הבא (olam haba). We live in this world of brokenness and challenge, and we yearn for a day when things will once again be whole. Sometimes we refer to this new era as the Messianic times, and to get there, we do acts of tikkun olam.
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Tikkun olam is not only social action— the mystics teach that doing any kind of mitzvah, or divine obligation, serves to mend this world. Feeding the hungry is tikkun olam, but so is prayer, giving to tzedakah, celebrating Tu Bishvat, or even going to the gym and taking care of ourselves.
So this new year, do some more mitzvot. When an opportunity arises, and we feel the stress of that dissonance, do a mitzvah, and bring some wholeness to this world.
Published in Temple Emanu-El of Edison, New Jersey’s Newsletter, Kolaynu, January 2014
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