There is something extraordinary about the way the new year, now almost upon us, will begin.

Before we have done anything—before we have had a chance to make a resolution, repair a failure, climb a ladder, or become the person we hope to become—it will already be Shabbat.

And on that first day of Rosh Hashanah, something will be missing.

The shofar.

Think about that. Rosh Hashanah without the shofar?

The Torah calls Rosh Hashanah Yom Teruah. The shofar is the voice of the day. It is the cry that reaches into places words cannot reach.

It is the call, in the words of Maimonides: “Awake, you sleepers, from your sleep.”1

It is the trumpet of coronation: There is a King. Look up.

And perhaps most simply, the shofar says to us:

Come higher.

You have spent a year down here—busy, distracted, worried, sometimes disappointed in yourself, sometimes simply exhausted by the weight of ordinary life.

Come higher.

Remember who you are. Remember what you can be. Remember why G‑d put you here.

And yet, this year, on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, that call will not sound.

Why not?

Chassidut gives us a breathtaking answer.

Because it is Shabbat.

And on Shabbat, we don’t need to be called higher.

We are already higher.

That is what Shabbat is.

For six days a week, we grapple with this world. We earn and spend, build and fix, answer and argue, succeed and sometimes fail. We take a stubbornly physical world and try to make something spiritual and holy out of it.

And then Shabbat comes.

For twenty-four hours, G‑d lifts us out of all of that and says:

Come higher. Come home.

The destination toward which we have been struggling all week is suddenly where we are.

And so, when Rosh Hashanah is Shabbat, the shofar has almost nothing to tell us that Shabbat has not already given us.

The shofar says: Climb.

Shabbat says: You have arrived.

That is why G‑d arranged for this year to begin this way. He is telling us something about the year He is about to give us.

We so often prepare to begin a new year with a list of what is wrong with us.

I have to change this. I have to stop that. I have to become more patient, more disciplined, more Jewish, more spiritual.

I somehow have to get from here to there.

This year, G‑d is asking us to begin somewhere else.

Not with how far away we are, but with how close we already are.

Not with everything that is wrong with us, but with the holy place inside us that was never broken in the first place.

Not: Someday I will get there.

But: I am starting from there.

Of course, Shabbat will end and Rosh Hashanah will continue. The next morning, we will blow the shofar.

G‑d does not want us to remain in the protected holiness of Shabbat. He sends us back into His world—to families and businesses, kitchens and offices, relationships and responsibilities. And the shofar will remind us why we are doing all of that.

But now we go there differently.

We go having spent the first—and, most importantly, the defining—day of the year already at the destination.

That is the daring message and invitation of this Rosh Hashanah:

Don’t spend this year trying to become the person you imagine you ought to be.

Begin with the person G‑d already knows you are.

Begin higher.

Begin closer.

Begin with Shabbat.

Begin with Torah.

And then take that person with you into the year—

Going higher, going stronger, going prouder, going happier, living more Jewishly, learning more Torah, doing more mitzvahs—and always going forward.

May G‑d give each of us the courage and the wisdom to believe that we really can begin there—and from that place, may we build a year of greater goodness, greater holiness, greater joy, and a world transformed by the light He has already placed within us.