Submission received late August 2025
Rosh HaShana LaBehemot, The Jewish New Year for the Animals, is a nearly lost holy day on our calendar. Falling on the 1st of the month of Elul, it coincides with the first blasts from practicing shofar blowers, summoning our attention to this onramp of soul searching, leading up to the High Holy Days – the ones which start with the big Rosh HaShanah ™️ just one month later.
In the days of the ancient Temple, 1 Elul was a tithing holiday, a day for marking that we had made the proper contribution from our herds into the community resources, distributed amongst priests, widows, orphans, and people in poverty. Without the Temple the day fell away, systems of taxes and charity changed.
But just as Tu BiShevat, The New Year for the Trees, was resuscitated from a vestigial tithing day into a holiday for the sacred act of environmental activism by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and the The Jewish Campaign for Trees for Vietnam (1971), the time is ripe for embracing The Animals’ New Year.
Here are some questions we can ask on this auspicious day:
Whose violence against animals is endorsed and profitable?
Whose liberation of animals is criminalized?
What excuses for our own behavior did we make this year that we would like to work on in the coming animal year?
When I was/will be reincarnated as an animal, what opportunities do I want to have? Which fates do I want to make impossible?
Soon we will read from Ecclesiastes 3:19
כִּי מִקְרֶה בְנֵי־הָאָדָם וּמִקְרֶה הַבְּהֵמָה וּמִקְרֶה אֶחָד לָהֶם כְּמוֹת זֶה כֵּן מוֹת זֶה וְרוּחַ אֶחָד לַכֹּל וּמוֹתַר הָאָדָם מִן־הַבְּהֵמָה אָיִן כִּי הַכֹּל הָבֶל׃
So what happens to humans happens to animals; the same thing happens to them ; as one dies, so the other, and breath of one is to all; the preeminence of person over animal is nothing, everything is a vanishing mist.
https://www.sefaria.org/Ecclesiastes.3.19
For this reason it may be that the The New Year for Animals is a month before the human new year. Animals were here first, we’re guests in their home.
This Jewish New Year for the Animals we would like to draw attention to the case of the Northumberland Two, Celeste Legere and Cara Mitrano, who are accused of allegedly freeing over 600 mink from a PA fur farm. We balked when we read that they were charged with “Cruelty to Animals” while the fur farm who slaughters thousand of mink every year (with gas, electrocution, and snapped necks) after suffering them to short lives in tight cages, gets to point the finger.
Drop the charges! Free them all! Even the mink 🤍