The Light That Has Never Been: A Rosh Hashanah Reflection

By Rabbi Naftali Brawer Ph.D.
Neubauer Executive Director, Tufts Hillel
Jewish Chaplain, Tufts University

This time of year I am often reminded of a childhood experience. It’s one that I didn’t fully appreciate at the time, but it continues to grow with significance as I get older.  

It was the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year and I was hanging about in the lobby of our synagogue with some friends waiting for services to begin when an older man on his way to services approached our little group and exclaimed with great feeling “Children, do you know what tonight is?” Mildly irked that he interrupted our conversation with such an inane question we snidely responded that of course we did. But the man persisted, “And do you understand what happens on Rosh Hashanah?” Not quite sure of the answer, we looked at him quizzically. He continued “The Hasidic masters of the Chabad school teach that on Rosh Hashanah an Ohr Chadash – a New Light – descends on the world containing all the possibilities of the coming year. Since the beginning of time the world has never seen this light before and it will never see it again. Something entirely new is about to happen!” 

While it took some years for me to fully understand what he meant, his excitement was palpable and infectious and left a lasting impact on me.  

The teaching he referred to sees the Jewish New Year as not merely a celebratory marking of time but as a moment of fresh creation. Each Rosh Hashanah, the world is renewed from its very source. The “new light” (Ohr Chadash) is not simply a poetic image; it is the divine potential embedded within the coming year containing all the possibilities, opportunities, challenges, and relationships that have never before existed and will never exist again in quite the same way.  

This vision, rooted in the rich symbolic world of Judaism and Chasidism, finds a striking echo in the writings of the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In a letter to his wife, the sculptor Clara Rilke-Westhoff, he wrote: 

“And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious, and great things.” 

Rilke’s words capture, in a different language and from a different spiritual tradition, the same intuition at the heart of the Chasidic teaching of Ohr Chadash: that the future is not simply a continuation of the past, but a realm of genuine possibility. The year ahead is not yet defined by what has been. It arrives carrying gifts we cannot yet see, encounters we cannot yet imagine, and invitations we have not yet received. 

Perhaps this is one of the great challenges of beginning again. We spend so much of our lives assuming tomorrow will look much like yesterday. We become experts at predicting ourselves, our habits, our limitations, and the stories we tell about who we are and what is possible. Rosh Hashanah challenges that instinct. It reminds us that the next chapter has not yet been written. 

Whatever the past year has brought, another year now waits to be lived. Somewhere within it may be a conversation that changes you, an unexpected friendship, a difficult truth, an act of courage, an idea, or a calling; things that, at this very moment, exist only as possibility. 

What new light might be waiting to enter the world through you this year?