Learning from Twighlight Erev Rosh Ha-Shanah
The old year has just ended, and the new year has barely begun. Hinneinu, here we are, on Erev Rosh Ha-Shanah in a liminal, in-between space that is, like twilight, a realm of indistinctness in which hard edges blur, and the sharp colours of the day give way to shades of grey.
The Hebrew word, erev, which is translated in English as ‘eve’, and denotes ‘evening’, is derived from the Hebrew verb, to ‘mix’, represented by three Hebrew consonants, Ayin – Reish – Shin. Logically, evening is an in-between time that is a mixture of day and night. The word erev is connected with another word with the same root: ma’arav, ‘west’. The sun sets in the west, and after sunset, the sky is a mixture of light and dark.
Rather than simply accept that night will soon descend, and that in a few hours, a new day will dawn, I would like to invite us to pause in this in-between moment, and reflect on what it teaches us – about life and the journey of life, about Jewish time, about our nature as humans, and about ourselves.
In March, my latest book was published, Breaking Binaries. A progressive rabbi engages in contemporary issues. In my book I challenge either/or assumptions, and the ways in which we force life into binary, and often oppositional, categories. The binary of ‘day and night’ is an example of this phenomenon, and one which we experience in every twenty-four period, 365 days-and-nights of the year.
Rosh Ha-Shanah, literally, ‘the head of the year’, which falls on the first day of the seventh month, Tishri, is known by a number of different names. One of these is harat olam, the ‘birthday of the world’. And so, the Jewish year begins not with our first Jewish ancestors, Abraham and Sarah, but rather with the beginning of everything. If we turn to the beginning of the Torah, we find that each of the initial six days set out in the first Creation narrative, concludes with the phrase, ‘And it was evening and it was morning …’ – Va-y’hi erev, va-y’hi voker …[1] Meanwhile, the narrative, through a series of declamations, establishes a number of binaries: heaven and Earth; light and dark; day and night; seas and dry land; humanity and the rest of creation. Nevertheless, at the same time it reiterates a statement about the liminal ‘in between’ dimension, between one day and another. Erev, ‘evening’, begins after sunset, when the light begins to fade until the night darkness takes over. In the Babylonian Talmud tractate Shabbat 34b, in the context of determining the beginning of Shabbat, there is a fascinating discussion concerning the uncertainty – the word used is sapheik, ‘doubt’ – involved in the period when it is neither completely ‘day’, nor completely ‘night’ – that is, twilight, although this word is not used.
In the phrase, Va-y’hi erev, va-y’hi voker, ‘And it was evening and it was morning’, it is not only the word erev that draws attention to the liminal arena between sunset and sunrise. The noun, boker, ‘morning’, is derived from the root Beit Kuf Reish, meaning to ‘seek’, but originally, to ‘divide’, to ‘discern’, corresponding to the Arabic root to ‘slit’, ‘rip’, ‘split’. And so it is that the noun, bakar, meaning cattle, herd or ox, points to the role of these domestic animals in ploughing the land. Similarly, boker suggests the penetration of the light of day into the darkness of night.
In the first rabbinic code of law, the Mishnah, in the tractate, B’rakhot, ‘Blessings’, we find a very interesting discussion that interrogates the time period between night and day. Opening with the theme of when the Sh’ma,[2] should be recited in the evening – and connecting the times of prayer with the times when offerings were presented by the priests in the Temple (Mishnah B’rakhot 1:1) – the second paragraph turns to the recitation of the morning Sh’ma. The paragraph begins (1:2):
At what time does one begin to recite the Sh’ma in the morning? When one can distinguish between blue and white. Rabbi Eliezer says, between blue and green (and concludes it) by sunrise.
It is important to note that the noun for ‘morning’ used here, which is also used for ‘morning prayer’, is shacharit, not boker. Shacharit, related to the biblical noun, shachar, means ‘dawn’. The issue for the rabbis is when does dawn begin? The first two statements provide answers to that question. The word for ‘green’, karti, means ‘leek-green’. The word for ‘blue’, t’kheilet, is the same word used for the ‘blue’ thread amongst the white tzitzit, ‘fringes’, worn on the four-cornered garment mentioned in the third paragraph of the Sh’ma (Numbers 15:37 ff.).
In the commentary on the Mishnah that we find in the G’mara, which documents the discussions of the amoraim, literally, ‘speakers’, the later generations of scholars, who explicated the Mishnah, the second comment relates directly to the tzitzit (Babylonian Talmud B’rakhot 9b):
What is the meaning of ‘between blue [t’kheilet] and white’? Shall I say: between a lump of white wool and a lump of blue wool? This one may also distinguish in the night! It means rather: between the blue [thread] in it [i.e., the fringe] and the white in it.
The purpose of the thread of t’kheilet, which was later not included in the tzitzit because of the problem of identifying the exact t’kheilet-blue, was to be visible to the individual.[3] As it says in what became the second paragraph of the Sh’ma (Num. 15:37-39a):
The Eternal said to Moses: / Speak to the Israelites and say to them that they should make themselves fringes on the corners of their garments throughout their generations; let them attach a thread of blue to the fringe at each corner. / And it will be for you as a fringe and you will see it [my emphasis] and you will remember all the commandments of the Eternal and do them…
While morning clearly begins at sunrise, there is a period between the night and the day, which commences with the dawn, when the increasing light, enabling the individual to distinguish between the blue and white of the fringe, indicates that the time of reciting the morning Sh’ma has begun, even though the sun has not yet risen.
From evening, erev, which corresponds to the fading of the light of the previous day, until morning, boker, which follows the night, there is a liminal region: between night and day. Further, as Rabbi Howard Cooper reflects, the first use of the word yom, ‘day’, in the Torah (Genesis 1:5) demonstrates that:[4]
there is an immediate subversion built into the text of the binary opposition between Day/yom and Night/laylah. Although ‘yom’ is the name given to the ‘Day’ alone, the text concludes, ‘and there was evening and there was morning, one YOM’. You could probably construe this in different ways, but at a minimum it subverts/confounds our innate wish to separate into simple binary pairs/opposites.
The tradition of Jewish teaching is all about interrogating texts and words, and drawing out nuances and meanings. So, what are the implications for us of the awareness that we spend so much of our lives in between day and night, night and day? What sense are we making right now, of this twilight moment?
I would like to think that inhabiting twilight fully and consciously would nudge us towards reflection on how we might find ways of getting between the other binaries that characterise our lives. The most obvious one of these is gender. The majority of people are born biologically female or biologically male, and until recently, the one in two-thousand born intersex in various ways, were invariably surgically readjusted to conform with the male/female binary.[5]
In recent years, in the context of new thinking about sex and gender, increasing numbers of people beyond those who are intersex have been identifying themselves as gender queer or non-binary. Personally, I have done this because, despite the efforts of lesbian feminists like me, who participated in the Women’s Liberation Movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s in order to challenge male domination, most societies the world over are still invested in a male/female power dynamic that forces every person from the moment of birth into a binary gender straitjacket. So, how would it be if we allowed our experience of twilight at this moment of the turning of the year to enter our beings and influence our sense of ourselves, so that we could emerge with the consciousness of ourselves, not as female or male, but rather, primarily, as humans?
Significantly, the Creation narratives at the beginning of the Book of Genesis, challenge more than our assumptions about day and night, light and dark. Significantly, although the first Creation story places the human at the pinnacle of creation, it also teaches that every creature, like the human is nefesh chayyah, a ‘living being’ (Gen. 1:20;21;24). Meanwhile, the second Creation story, rather than commanding the human, both male and female, to subdue and dominate the rest of creation (Gen. 1:28), situates the undifferentiated human – who, in this version is ‘formed from the dust of the ground’ (Gen. 2:7) – in the circumscribed space of a garden, with the humble task of working it and maintaining it (Gen. 2:15).
‘The human’, ha-adam, intimately connected with ‘the ground’, ha-adamah. One of my favourite T-shirts bears the slogan, ‘Human Beings 100% Organic Colours Vary’. Returning to the question I put a few moments ago, but revising it slightly: How would it be if we allowed our experience of twilight at this moment of the turning of the year to enter our beings and influence our sense of ourselves, so that we could emerge with the consciousness of ourselves, primarily, as earthlings, organic creatures, living beings, intrinsically connected to Life in all its gloriously variegated forms?
And what would be the implications of such a consciousness? Surely, the reality of our organic nature, shared with all life, is that, as Genesis puts it in chapter 3, ‘for dust you are, and to dust you shall return’, Ki-afar attah, v’el-afar tashuv (3:19). Like all organic matter from the microscopic amoeba to the magnificent elephant, it is in our nature to grow, blossom, and finally, disintegrate, and return to the earth. How would it be if we embraced, not only life around us, but our own organic selves, and accepted our mortality? What difference might that make to our experience of life? To our experience of every day? To our appreciation of being alive? Of course, unlike all other life-forms on this beautiful blue planet, humans have, both, the capacity to be aware of our mortality, and the capacity to look back into the past and gaze forward into the future. These capacities may be understood as our special gifts as humans, but they may also have negative consequences for our ability, both, to experience deeply, spiritually, intellectually, sensuously, the present moment, and to relate to the other forms of life that inhabit the present with us. How would it be if we could find ways to, both, to accept our mortality and be fully present in the present?
This evening, I have invited you to be present in this twilight moment. As I draw to a conclusion, I’m going to recite the Twilight People Prayer written by Rabbi Reuben Zelman, the first openly transgender person to be accepted for rabbinic training at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in the United States.[6] We recite it at the beginning of our Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue annual eve of Brighton Pride Seder. This Erev Rosh Ha-Shanah, I’m offering it as a prayer for all of us, as we stand on the threshold of the New Year:
As the sun sinks and the colours of the day turn, we offer a blessing for the twilight,
For twilight is neither day nor night, but in-between.
We are all twilight people. We can never be fully labelled or defined.
We are many identities and loves, many genders and none.
We are in between roles, at the intersection of histories, or between place and place.
We are crisscrossed parts of memory and destination, streaks of light swirled together.
We are neither day nor night.
We are both, neither, and all.
May this in-between light illuminate our way to the God who transcends all categories and definitions.
May the in-between people who have come to pray be lifted up into this twilight.
We cannot always define; we can always say a blessing.
Blessed are you, God of all, who brings on the twilight. And let us say: Amen.
Rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah
Edinburgh Liberal Jewish Congregation
Erev Rosh Ha-Shanah
11th September 2026 / 1st Tishri 5787
See: Genesis 1.5; 8; 13; 19; 23; 31. The ‘v’ of ‘voker’, ‘morning’, is the consonant, Beit. As a result of a grammatical rule, the Beit loses its dageish, ‘dot’, following a vowel in the previous syllable (or a vowel at the end of the previous word, where two words are connected together), and so is pronounced, ‘v’. ↑
The liturgical text of the Sh’ma is composed of three paragraphs from the Torah: Deut. 6.4-9; 11.13-21; Num. 15.37-41. ↑
See the Babylonian Talmud Menachot 42b-44a for discussions of the testing required to ensure that a ‘blue’ was t’kheilet [my choice of transliteration of the Hebrew]. For an exploration of t’kheilet, see: Navon, Mois. (Undated). Threads of Reason. A Collection of Essays on Tekheilet. https://www.divreinavon.com/pdf/ThreadsOfReason.pdf. (Accessed: 7 November 2025). ↑
Private email correspondence with the author, MumFourI’m coming down to make tea11.03.14. ↑
With very few exceptions, as soon as a baby is born that tiny bundle of life is instantly identified as ‘female’ or ‘male’, and the one in two thousand births where there is some doubt, were, until recently, unilaterally processed for surgical adjustment, so that they could be fitted into the binary gender regime. See the following sources (all accessed: 9 November 2025): the Intersex Society of North America: http://www.isna.org/faq/ten_myths/rare; IGLHRC, MULABI and Jimenez, Natasha. (2011). Intersex Shadow Report to the 5th and 6th National Report of the Republic of Costa Rica on the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), 27.06.2011. http://intersex.shadowreport.org/post/2012/10/26/Shadow-Report-CEDAW-2011; Jones, Tiffany. (2018). ‘Intersex Studies: A Systematic Review of International Health Literature’, Sage Open, 8(2), May. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244017745577; Monro, S., Carpenter, M., Crocetti, D., Davis, G., Garland, F., Griffiths, D., and Aggleton, P. (2021). ‘Intersex: cultural and social perspectives’, Culture, Health & Sexuality, 23(4), pp.431–440. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2021.1899529; Guo, J., Marsh, H.W., and Parker, P.D., et al. (2024). ’Cross-Cultural Patterns of Gender Differences in STEM: Gender Stratification, Gender Equality and Gender-Equality Paradoxes’, Educational Psychology Review, 36(37). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-024-09872-3. ↑
https://www.keshetonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Twilight-People.pdf
https://reformjudaism.org/blog/gender-expression-isnt-purim-costume ↑