Five thousand, seven hundred and sixty eight years ago, give or take a week,* the divine will spun this earth into being. Tiamat the ocean was broken into a hundred seas, spread all around Gaia the land, while Quetzalcoatl the feathered serpent roared across Uranus the sky and poked thousands of star shaped holes in his skin. At some point, Slartibartfast and the other Magratheans pounded the enormous island Marduk into shape as a landing strip for the Douglas DC-8 Airplanes of Xenu, and that's how a pink unicorn was able to come to Midgard and teach Vishnu how to plant apple seeds all across the country while riding his big blue ox named Babe.
Maybe that's not the story according to reputable scientific sources like Stephen Hawking and Wikipedia. I'm not sure why you'd believe that kind of drooling, incomprehensible, robotic babble... Or listen to anything Stephen Hawking says either.
I believe this world came from somewhere, and that there were mighty and incomprehensible forces involved, and that at some ineffable and fundamentally unknowable point there was intention behind those forces, and maybe there still is. So me and my family and my family's family and a lot of other people going back at least five thousand years have got this tradition, where once a year we invoke the intentional force and ask for more time, more health, to do a better job this year of following that mighty and incomprehensible (let's just call it divine...) intent. We eat apple slices dipped in honey, for a sweet year filled with new fruits. We walk down to the running waters and pull breadcrumbs out of our pockets, and throw them in, to give up the sins we have indulged in from the last year. The actions we regret, if you'd rather not think about what "sin" entails.
We listen to ritual notes blown from a ram's horn instrument called a Shofar. These notes call us to go to temple, join the ritual, and heed the divine intent.
So eat something sweet today, killoggs, and empty your pockets of crumbs. Hope for more of the rare pleasures and happy days and healthy friends, and ask for strenth to have fewer things to regret, and fewer things to need forgiving, next year. L'shanah tovah tikatevi v'taihatemi! May you be inscribed for a good year in the book of life!
