Question:

Everyone else has a great time celebrating their New Year’s Day. Why do we take ours so seriously? What’s this whole judgment deal? Why all the prayers? Can’t we just party?

Response:

If you would know the drama that’s going on, you would zip out of the wildest party to be there. Imagine the entire universe in reboot. Imagine a mega-surge of creative energy, enough to power the whole of reality for an entire year. Imagine a system loading parameters for every galaxy, star, planet, organism, cell, protein, molecule and atom over a 48-hour period, and you’re starting to get the idea. And you? You are adjusting the input at every step.

You see, time doesn’t run smoothly. It’s not just some steady stream, like a train of cars one neatly shlepped after the other. It’s more like a pulse, with each new moment carefully and deliberately articulated through the medium of a cosmic soul that powers all life and existence. Every year, that packet of energy slips back to its primal zero state. From this point on—the night of Rosh Hashanah—the universe is effectively on life support. It receives just the juice it needs so that it will not utterly recede back to nothingness.

When the shofar is blown the next day, a new vitality of a higher order than any that preceded it enters time and space. Now get this: Time is also a creation. So time is also renewed. The past now exists as a consequence of the present—something like if you had rebooted in the middle of watching a video and now continued from where you left off. As far as you know, the old past may have been a very different past. But you couldn’t know. All you know is this past that was loaded into the PRAM at reboot. And since this vital force is a new force, on a qualitatively different level than whatever came before, this new past is truly new.

Why the judgment? Well, you can’t just feed anything into the system. The energy source we are discussing is unlimited, but the target system—our reality—has discrete parameters. Rebooting without taking those parameters into account could be like plugging your laptop directly into the 22.5-gigawatt current blasting out of the power plant on the Yangtze. And infinitely worse.

So there’s gotta be an accounting made. Like your laptop, the parameters of the physical universe are set at the core level. In this case, that means human consciousness. As far as the Creator is concerned, His entire universe is nothing more than a human observation. All He needs to do, then, is to look into the state of that consciousness and accordingly adjust the flow of current.

That’s empowering. Because, you see, those parameters of human consciousness are dynamic and not determined by the system. They are determined by us. If we open them up, they contain more—and more is given. Tighten them, and the conduits of life tighten along with them.

Now comes the vital information: What is open and what is tight? This is kind of counterintuitive. In the words of the dean of the heavenly academy (cited in the Zohar, an encoded manual for system maintenance), “Big is small, and small is big.” Unencrypted: Make yourself big, and you can’t contain anything; make yourself small, and you can contain the unlimited.

That’s what we are doing on Rosh Hashanah: making ourselves very small. Expanding our little minds to a state of realization that, hey, there is something bigger than me—and not just elephants. And maybe even, hey, I didn’t make this place. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. It’s totally unprogrammable, undecodable and ungeekly. And here I am, just another artifact of the system, observing itself from inside of it. I could be re-scripted, or even deleted from the code altogether, at the whim of Whoever Is Running This. And now that Whoever is asking me to discuss with Him the plans for the coming reboot.

In a state of utter awe and wonderment, the Reboot finds its most fertile soil.