By: Nomi Kaltmann as seen in The Herald Sun
11 September 2026
How do you usually mark the beginning of a new year? Do you make resolutions, promising yourself that this will be the year you eat better, spend less time on your phone, call your family more often, and exercise more?
I know I do.
I love the new year, there is something almost magical about the idea of starting afresh. Of course, intellectually I know that nothing actually changes when the clock strikes midnight, yet, somehow, when a new year ticks over, it feels like we have given a chance for a new beginning.
An opportunity to look back at the year that has passed, to think about what went wrong and what went right, and to make resolutions how the year ahead might be different.
For Jewish people, today is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year.
Across the world Jews mark Rosh Hashanah, by gathering together and listening to the ancient cry of the shofar, a ram’s horn. Over Rosh Hashanah, it is blown more than one hundred times, and for many people it is climax of the Jewish New Year celebration, where the synagogue is packed with hundreds of people, who fall silent to hear this ancient horn being blown.
There is something moving and beautiful about the sound of the shofar. It is not music in the traditional sense.
There is something moving and beautiful about the sound of the shofar. It is not music in the traditional sense.
It is raw and almost primal, a long, piercing cry. It is a sound that calls us to wake up, but also to stop, to listen and to remember that life is finite and it is up to us to make the right choices in our lives.
In the weeks leading up to Rosh Hashanah, Jewish homes are extremely busy with preparations. We buy apples and honey, hoping for a sweet year.
We fill our tables with pomegranates and other traditional foods, like a fish head, hoping that our year will be multiplied in goodness and that we will be like the head and not the tail.
But underneath all the food and celebration is a much more serious invitation, to think about the people we have been in the past 12 months, and to consider what kind of people we still have the chance to become in the year ahead.
Rosh Hashanah gives us an opportunity to say sorry, to repair relationships and to make different choices.
It also gives us a chance to make amends, ask for forgiveness and to work on our behaviour.
And perhaps that is why I love that, here in Australia, Rosh Hashanah arrives just as winter gives way to spring.
The days stretch longer, the cold begins to lift, and the world around us seems to be waking from its sleep, and into the warm weather ahead.
It feels like an invitation to listen a little more carefully and ask ourselves the most important question of all: what resolutions will I make for myself that will help me to become the kind of person do I want to become in the year ahead?