Rosh Hashanah

Here at Truro School, we welcome all world views and celebrate several of the major world faith festivals in the course of the school year.

This week is the Jewish New Year – Rosh Hashanah – which means ‘Head of the Year’, a time to reflect on our actions in the year past and strive for goodness and grace in the year ahead.

The New Year Greeting for Rosh Hashanah is ‘Shana Tova’, which is a blessing conveying the message of  ‘wishing you many sweet blessings.’  A tradition during Rosh Hashanah is to dip apples into honey and thank God for all the sweet things in our lives, and look forward to a sweet new year.

We shared this custom in Chapel assembly at the Prep and out in the Courtyard with our Seniors.  In chapel, we learned about the word ‘Shalom’, which is found in the Hebrew bible over 250 times, a word that means ‘God’s peace be with you’, though its meaning goes beyond that to being a blessing for wholeness, wellbeing and harmony in the world.

As we remembered the UN International Day of Peace (21^st Sept) with a call to ‘act now for a peaceful world’, we sang a prayerful blessing, ‘Shalom my friends’, and thought about how we might all seek to  ‘do peace’ in our lives and seek to resolve our differences in peaceful ways.