Happy New (School) Year!
Dear all
It was a great pleasure to welcome all our students back to school on Monday, in particular those for whom this has been their first full week at Brentwood Senior School. Our wish for everyone is that they will settle in quickly, make new friends and take advantage of the opportunities they will all have as the weeks and months progress.
One of the strengths of our school community is the fact that across our student and staff body, we have people from all walks of life, from different backgrounds and countries, and from different religious faiths. In some of our assemblies this year, we will reference, highlight, and celebrate some of the key religious festivals that some of our students may be celebrating to consider what we might all learn from their key messages. On Monday, we considered what we might all learn from the Jewish festival of Rosh Hashanah, which begins at sunset this evening.
Rosh Hashanah translates from Hebrew as ‘head of the year’, and is celebrated as the anniversary of the creation of the first humans, Adam and Eve. It is a time filled with rich traditions. Families gather for festive meals, eating round challah bread to symbolise the continuous cycle of the year, apples dipped in honey to represent their hopes for a sweet and happy new year, or pomegranates, which symbolise the hope that the year ahead will be as full of blessings as the fruit is full of seeds. Alongside these celebrations, Rosh Hashanah is also a serious and reflective time. It marks the start of ten days of repentance, a period dedicated to looking back at the past year and atoning for mistakes. One custom – called Tashlich – involves people visiting a flowing body of water and symbolically casting away their past sins and mistakes by throwing bread or pebbles into the depths, representing the letting go of bad choices from the year before. The overarching theme is teshuvah, commonly translated as ‘repentance’ but which more literally means to ‘return’. It is a dedicated time to make amends, apologise to anyone wronged in the past year, and resolve to be better moving forward.’
I said to the students on Monday that, as we start the academic year, there is an important lesson we can all take from the spirit of Rosh Hashanah, regardless of our own personal beliefs, namely, the opportunity for a fresh beginning. We will all be able to recall something from last year that we didn’t do as well as we would have liked. For our students, it might have been the way they approached an exam; the way they reacted to a setback; maybe they were unkind to a classmate, fell out with a friend, or just missed opportunities to contribute fully to our community.
During synagogue services at this time of year, a musical instrument made from a hollowed-out ram’s horn – called a shofar – is blown. Its piercing blast acts as a spiritual ‘wake-up call,’ urging people to examine their recent actions and correct their ways. In our assembly, I encouraged everyone to cast away the things from last year we didn’t do well, and to commit to being the best version of ourselves over the next 12 months. There is much to look forward to and much to do.
The traditional Jewish greeting during this holiday is ‘Shanah Tovah,’ which means ’a good year’. As we begin the new school year, with all it will bring, I wish you all a sweet, successful, and happy year ahead.
Best wishes
Michael Bond
