As sunset tonight (6th September 2021) marks the start of the Jewish New Year I’d like to wish a hearty ‘Shana Tova’ to all this blog’s many Jewish readers and I hope that a sweet year is ahead for everyone. After sunset tonight it will be a new Jewish year, the year 5782 in the Hebrew calendar.
Jewish New Year or Rosh Hashanah (translation ‘head of the year’) as it is more properly known in Hebrew is not like the civil new year, it’s not a piss-up, it’s a time for introspection and looking back at the year just gone and resolving to be better, and do better, in the year ahead. Rosh Hashanah is in Jewish theology, a time for acknowledging the sovereignty of the Eternal One and to celebrate the miracle of creation. It’s also a time for making amends between individuals and, this is very important, a time for giving to charitable causes. This year, as in other years, if you’d like to mark this occasion, whether you are Jewish or not, then I’d appeal to you to support the British ex-services charity ‘Combat Stress’ as this year’s Rosh Hashanah charity as they are a group doing great work and are a charity that is most worthy of support.
The work of Combat Stress is vital as many British ex service personnel return from the battlefield with mental injuries that can be just as debilitating as a physical injury. Nightmares, flashbacks, relationship breakdown, substance abuse and suicide following discharge from the services are all too often the result of service personnel seeing some of the most traumatic things imaginable.
The statistics of post discharge mental illness among ex service personnel are truly horrifying. For example more British veterans of the Falklands War have committed suicide than ever died on the battlefields. That’s a figure that should not only shame us as a nation, but should also spur us into action.
The work of Combat Stress is especially important this year with the British withdrawal from Afghanistan being so prominently in the news. There will be many ex or serving service personnel who will have served in Afghanistan and who may have lost friends there and who may have suffered mental trauma because of their service in that conflict.
Therefore, when you are sitting down to your Rosh Hashanah lunch, or are dipping your apples in honey, please spare some thoughts and some spare cash for those who suffered and continue to suffer the negative mental after-effects of their service to the United Kingdom. Those who have served the nation deserve a much sweeter year than they have had so far. You can help to make the lives of troubled ex service persons sweeter by giving as much as you can to the work of Combat Stress.
To find out more about the work of Combat Stress and to donate to this vital organisation then please visit the link below.
http://www.combatstress.org.uk/about-us/
I’d like to end this piece by wishing everyone who celebrates Rosh Hashanah, L’shanah tovah tikatev v’taihatem (May you be sealed and inscribed for a good year)
I’ll be back on Wednesday night when the festival concludes.
