Rosh Hashana celebrates the Jewish New Year. Rosh Hashanah 2024 begins at sundown on Wednesday, October 2 and concludes at sundown on Friday, October 4, 2024. The New Year’s holiday with various events concludes on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) which runs from sunset October 11th to sunset October 12th.
Symbolically, it remembers the creation of the universe by God and is a time of reflection on how the world has changed into something entirely different than the one that God had created. For ten days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, Jews may remember the losses and sufferings caused by human evil. So, the holiday of Rosh Hashanah is also known as Yom Hazikaron, Day of Remembrance.
The central observance of Rosh Hashanah is blowing the shofar (ram’s horn) on both mornings of the holiday (except on Shabbat), which is normally done in the synagogue as part of the day’s services.
Rosh Hashanah feasts traditionally include round challah bread (studded with raisins) and apples dipped in honey, as well as other foods that symbolize our wishes for a sweet year.
The Year of 2024 is unique. It is a day of celebration of God’s creation of the world, humankind, and the birth of Israel. The ten days of New Year’s celebration will also include a memorial of the attempted genocide of October 7, 2023.
One of the best things that we can do this Rosh Hashana is to try to understand how we, our neighbors, and fellow human beings can get swept up into a hateful distortion of a high and good spiritual vision. How does one get ensnared in Hezbollah and Hamas?
Recently, The Focus Project publicized a terrific documentary Hezbollah’s Hostages by the Center for Peace Communications, a New York nonprofit, based on the interviews of Shi’ite opponents of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Sunni victims of Hezbollah in Syria.
The Free Press has presented video episodes every Monday, starting on September 16th. The first episode of the series is “The Combatant.” It tells the story of a Lebanese Shi’ite boy transfixed by American action movies who is lured into combat by Hezbollah during its entry into the Syrian civil war. To obscure the identity of these interviewees, The producers have illustrated their stories with striking animation. The voices that you hear, however, are the actual voices of former members of Hezbollah.
Hezbollah—meaning “Party of God”—is an Islamist party, a terrorist group, an organized crime syndicate, and a proxy of Iran that for over four decades has spread destruction and death across the Middle East. Born out of the turmoil of the Lebanese civil war, it aims to eliminate Israel and undermine the West, in particular the United States.
But Hezbollah, designated a terror group by the U.S. since 1997, doesn’t limit its desire to assassinate, destroy, and subjugate to Israel and the West.
For decades it has harmed millions of Arabs and Muslims it supposedly champions. Hezbollah is a tyrant in its native Lebanon, an occupier in neighboring Syria, a transnational mafia of sex and drug trafficking, and the nerve center of Iran’s empire in Arab lands—what it calls the “Axis of Resistance”—stretching across the Levant, Yemen, and Iraq.
Hamas, which has ruled in Gaza for a generation and committed the atrocities against Israel on October 7, is also a proxy for Iran. But Hezbollah’s size and reach dwarf that of Hamas. Hezbollah likely has more than 40,000 active and reserve fighters, and an arsenal larger than that of many nations, with an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 rockets and missiles. — From The Free Press.
