The first mishnah of Tractate Rosh Hashanah declares that the first day of the month of Nissan, during which we celebrate the holiday of Pesach, is one of the dates on the Jewish calendar from which we count a new year. The subsequent Talmudic discussion suggests several good reasons that this date should serve as the new year marker on the calendar, even recording several arguments why the world ought to have been created in Nissan, rather than in Tishrei. Given that the first of Tishrei (i.e. Rosh Hashanah) ultimately secures the title of the New Year, precisely what kind of new year does the season of Nissan and its flagship holiday Pesach inaugurate?

 

Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev (1740-1809), in his monumental Torah commentary the Kedushat Levi, offers a metaphysical reading of the polarities of the calendar established by these opposing new year dates. He notes that Nissan in biblical sources is also referred to as “Hodesh Ha-Aviv,” the month of spring, and in fact the entire Jewish lunisolar calendar is oriented around keeping Pesach in the spring. [1] Aviv, as he points out, is written with the first two letters of the Hebrew alphabet: Aleph and Bet. By contrast, Tishrei is written with the final letters of the Hebrew alphabet in reverse order: Tav, Shin, Reish. On this linguistic peculiarity he offers the following teaching:

 

The fact is, there is an Abundance (Shefa) that flows from the Creator, on account of His vast goodness, for which He created the world in order to treat His creations beneficently, and not on account of any of their mortal deeds. And there is [another] Abundance that flows from the Creator [after] having been [first] awakened by Israel to fulfill their pleas…. On this my father and teacher of blessed memory [2] said that the former is called Tzitz, while the latter is called Tzitzit.

 

Moreover, there is a Direct Light (Or Yashar) and a Reflected Light (Or Hozer). [3] The Direct Light is the Abundance that flows downward from His vast goodness. And The Reflected Light is the Abundance that flows downward because of the earthly arousal that is awakened from below. And Or Yashar is Aleph-Bet, in linear order, while Or Hozer is the letters in reverse, Tav-Shin-Reish-Quf. In Tishrei, we do many mitzvot — as our Sages taught, that Tishrei is full of mitzvot [4] — and through the mitzvot we arouse the Abundance in this month – for this reason it is called Tishrei, the mystery (Sod) alluded to by Tav-Shin-Reish-Kuf. And in Nissan, the Abundance flows solely from His vast goodness – for this reason it is called the month of Aviv, Aleph-Bet, in linear order. [5]

 

The Kedushat Levi recognizes two processes through which divine abundance comes to flow into the world. On the one hand, there are ways for humans to awaken God’s attention to stimulate this flow, namely the performance of the commandments. On the other hand, there are times where the only impetus for the existence of divine light in the world is God’s utter goodness. In this theological framework, the cosmos was created simply to demonstrate compassion and grace for God’s people. [6] This, he teaches, is the significance of the directionality of the names of the respective seasons: in Tishrei, whose letters are written in reverse alphabetical order, human actors use mitzvot to provoke God’s attention, whereas in Aviv (i.e. Nissan and Pesach), the divine light simply flows due to God’s eternal beneficence. In Hasidic sources, these opposing cosmic forces are known in Aramaic as itaruta d’l’tata, “Arousal from Below,” and itaruta d’l’eila, “Arousal from Above.” R. Levi Yitzhak’s framework thus makes an interesting dialectic out of the Hebrew calendar year, where the six months from Tishrei to Adar are spent under the auspices of itaruta d’l’tata, while Nissan to Elul exist under the auspices of itaruta d’l’eila.

 

From the perspective of the human subjects, one might be tempted to valorize the agency of the “Arousal from Below” framework over the relatively passive approach of “Arousal from Above.” But everything in its season: “Arousal from Below” makes sense for the cold, dark winter months. A proper religious posture during six months of hibernation is indeed to emphasize finding God in the small moments, in its hiddenness. The symbols of the holidays reflect just that, with Hanukkah and its twinkling flames, Tu Bishvat and its tiny seeds and blossoms, and the Purim Megillah and the mysterious theological activity winking at us from just underneath the surface of its drama. Godliness is hidden in the dark world and it is our role to locate, uncover, and awaken it. Pesach, on the other hand, arrives after the spring equinox, where the amount of light in each day begins to outstrip the darkness. The directionality of the flow of divine light shifts, which is reflected in the rebalancing of the scales of visible light in the world as well. [7] This arrival of springtime serves as an indication of the metaphysical shift from itaruta d’l’tata to itaruta d’l’eila.  

 

R. Levi Yitzhak’s father subtly but dramatically expands the scope of this teaching in his description of the Or Yashar, the light of God’s unconditional goodness, with the term Tzitz. The word Tzitz has a multiplicity of meanings in biblical Hebrew, but one that offers the richest interpretation is that of a flower, as in Numbers 17:23, Isaiah 40:6-8, or Psalms 103:15. In other words, God’s unconditional goodness is manifested specifically in the natural world, whose lush and floral elements function as the tangible vessel, the proverbial “garment,” for the divine light. This point is only further confirmed by the observation that the Hebrew word for the natural world, ha-teva, bears the same numerological value as Elohim, the name of God that represents the physical manifestation of the ineffable Tetragrammaton, the shem Havayah. [8]  

 

A second resonance of the word Tzitz is along visual lines, as it is used in Song of Songs, which is read on Shabbat Pesach and often taken as an allegory for the dynamic between God and humanity: “My beloved is like a gazelle / Or like a young stag / There he stands behind our wall / Gazing through the window / Peering [Metzitz] through the lattice.” (Song. 2:5) Allegorically, this verse implies that God, gendered here as a male lover, is gazing intently at us, admittedly from behind a wall but undeniably present. Weaving these two dimensions of Tzitz together, it is as if God is gazing at us through the lattice of the natural world, silently, distantly, but undeniably present. 

 

What, then, does one do to embrace this season of “Arousal from Above”? It is not enough to simply stare back, an instinct regarding the romanticization of nature which William Cronon criticizes in his 1992 article “The Trouble With Wilderness.” Cronon laments the practice of gazing out into pristine and wild natural landscapes as the favored method of engagement with the sublime. He observes that this behavior in fact domesticates the sublime as a spectacle to be looked at and transforms nature itself into a secular cathedral, the wilderness a human construction not unlike any building. [9] 

 

The next verses of Song of Songs, which some communities recite during the Passover seder, suggest a different tack, where the proper response to the natural world, in the lover’s own words, is to intimately envelope oneself in it not just with sight but with all the senses:

 

My beloved spoke thus to me,
“Arise, my darling;
My fair one, come away!

For now the winter is past,
The rains are over and gone.

The blossoms have appeared in the land,
The time of pruning has come;
The song of the turtledove
Is heard in our land.

The green figs form on the fig tree,
The vines in blossom give off fragrance.
Arise, my darling;
My fair one, come away!” (Song. 2:10-13) 

 

The beloved is enjoined to venture out into the world for a full sensory experience: to hear the songs of the birds, to smell the blossoms on the vines, to feel the budding of the figs. And, as the lover makes clear, these are the sensations of springtime, now that the winter rains have receded. The moments of hiddenness are past, and now what is needed is to open oneself to the multifaceted elements of the natural world, each in its own way a different limb of the divine. 

 

Moreover, this mode of communing with the divine during the season of “Arousal from Above” is not entirely passive. The other part of Cronon’s critique of modern veneration of the wilderness is the problematic dichotomy where only untouched, pristine lands are sacred and anything man-made is contaminated, premised on the modern dissatisfaction with industrialized urban areas. Cronon points out the inherent irony in the romanticization of the wilderness, that “celebrating wilderness has been an activity mainly for well-to-do city folks” who have never worked the land a day in their lives. [10] Taking Cronon’s argument into account, it should be clear that the natural world that houses the sublime should not be limited to the “Big Outside.” Establishing a home for a flower or tree in a backyard garden can be just as important of a locus for the divine as wandering through an undiscovered area of the forest. God does not want God’s creation to remain untouched; we ought to be partners in creation too. [11] 

 

This is the new year that the holiday of Pesach heralds in Nissan. It notifies us of the cosmic shift from “Arousal from Below” to “Arousal from Above,” that with the return of the predominance of light – both divine and natural – it is time to go outside and encounter, as if for the first time, the sacredness awash in the natural world. A story is told of the German rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, who, late in life, surprised his students by announcing his intention to take a long trip to Switzerland. When asked about this decision, he replied: “Soon, I will stand before the Almighty. I will be held answerable to many questions. But what will I say when I am asked, ‘Shimshon, my son, it is true you did many mitzvot. But did you see my Alps?” [12] This is what it means to embrace the aspect of “Arousal from Above:” one can do many mitzvot to try to arouse God’s attention, but there are times when the most important pathway to experience the sacred is to venture outside to affirm the sheer majesty of the natural world. 

 

On an existential level, the arrival of itaruta d’l’eila means that we do not have to be obsessed with the project of meaning-making all the time, as one does in the winter when things are fundamentally hidden. We can instead embrace a season of meaning-finding, a posture which stems from the orientation that there is inherently a measure of meaning present in the world. [13] This posture calmly affirms the possibility of going out into the world and encountering the divine presence without needing to look too hard, like a trust fall with God. Starting from Nissan and joyously celebrated by Pesach, we can be assured that the Divine Light, the Or Yashar, is at these moments pulsing unconditionally throughout the cosmos. 

 

Endnotes:

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[1] Exodus 34:118, Deuteronomy 16:1. 

[2] R. Levi Yitzhak’s father was named R. Meir bar Moshe of Husakov. 

[3] See Moshe Cordovero’s Pardes Rimmonim Shaar 15.

[4] BT Rosh Hashanah 11a. 

[5] Kedushat Levi Bo 18.

[6] See also Likutei Moharan 64:1. 

[7] Northern hemisphere version. 

[8] Pardes Rimmonim, Shaar 12, ch. 2.

[9] William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995), 79.

[10] Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” 78.

[11] For one midrashic formulation of this impulse, see Seder Eliyahu Zuta 2. 

[12] See Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Jewish Wisdom: Ethical, Spiritual, and Historical Lessons from the Great Works and Thinkers (W. Morrow, 1994), 231.

[13] I thank Rabbi Matthew Ponak for this formulation.