The Coronation Puzzle

Rosh HaShanah is usually translated as the New Year. More precisely, it is the “Head of the Year.” But I want to ask a simpler question: what actually happens on this day?

Our sages tell us that this is the day on which we crown the King. In the Musaf prayer we recite Malchuyot, Zichronot, and Shofarot—verses of Kingship, Remembrance, and Shofar. The Talmud supplies the logic, as if G-d were saying: recite Kingship “so that you crown Me King over you,” Remembrance so that your memory rise before Me for good—“and with what? With the shofar.”[1]

Why the shofar? Because that is how kings are crowned. When Solomon was anointed, “they blew the shofar, and all the people said, ‘Long live King Solomon!’”[2] Rosh HaShanah presents itself not merely as the birthday of humanity and the world,[3] but as an enthronement.

And here we run into a difficulty. Human coronations mark a change: the old king dies and an heir succeeds him; a dynasty falls; a new sovereign takes the throne. Yet Scripture says of G-d, “I, Havayah, have not changed” (Malachi 3:6). There is no old King to die, no heir to succeed, no rival to seize the throne. So what, exactly, changes?

The Kabbalistic answer is that the change is not in the Divine essence but in the relation between the Creator and the creation. The Alter Rebbe writes in Tanya that the light of each year withdraws to its source on the eve of Rosh HaShanah and that, through the shofar and the prayers, a new and more sublime light is drawn down—one that has not shone before.[4] The old year’s allotment has run out; a new Divine vitality enters the world. It is renewed Kingship.

Why should that renewal depend on us? Because, as Rabbeinu Bechaye writes, ein melech b’lo am—“there is no king without a nation.”[5] Kingship is a relation. A king may possess every royal quality in himself, but he is king only over subjects who recognize and accept him; without a people accepting the yoke of Heaven, G-d would be lacking, as it were, the title of King.[6] Hence the distinctive service of Rosh HaShanah: kabbalat ol malchut shamayim—accepting the yoke of Heaven. We do not make the King; we make ourselves His subjects, and thereby renew the relation in which He is King. And since G-d’s sovereignty is, on many accounts, the very purpose of creation, when creation is renewed on Rosh HaShanah its purpose must be renewed as well. The stakes are high: because creation is continuous (creatio continua),[7] a Kingship not renewed would mean not a lesser year but no year at all.

I find one Elul custom especially striking. Throughout Elul, the month preceding Rosh HaShanah, the shofar is sounded on weekday mornings, but on the eve of Rosh HaShanah it falls silent.[8] The halachic rationale is simple, yet the silence also speaks: preparation has stopped, and the commanded coronation has not yet begun. For one day the instrument of both is absent, marking the abrupt passage from the old year into the new.

A Phase Transition

So far, the theology. Now the physics.

Physicists describe such changes with the theory of phase transitions—a language lately borrowed even for revolutions and regime changes,[9] and one I have applied to Jewish history elsewhere.[10]

Some changes happen gradually; in thermodynamics these are called second-order, or continuous, transitions. Others prepare gradually and then happen all at once; these are first-order transitions. Water may cool degree by degree, yet remain liquid until freezing begins; once ice takes hold, the substance has entered a different state.

The most important idea for us is this: the old state can persist even when the new one has become possible. Very clean water can stay liquid well below its freezing point because there is no good place for an ice crystal to start; give it a speck of dust or a seed, and freezing begins.[11] There is, so to speak, a barrier between “ready to freeze” and “freezing.” The system has been prepared for change, but preparation is not yet transformation.

Figure 1. A first-order transition: the old state persists until the barrier is crossed; then the renewed state becomes stable.

A year grows old day by day; Elul prepares us one day after another; yet Rosh HaShanah still marks a genuine change of state. The preparation is gradual; the coronation is not.

Why Rosh HaShanah Is a First-Order Transition

Start with the light. The Alter Rebbe does not say that last year’s light is made a little brighter; it withdraws, and a new light is drawn down. The coming year is not the old year one day later; it receives a vitality that has not appeared before.

Coronation has the same character. One may prepare for a wedding for months, study for years before ordination, deliberate for days before a verdict. Preparation is continuous; status is not. One is not half married, half ordained, or half crowned. Rosh HaShanah belongs to that family of thresholds where gradual preparation ends in an abrupt change.

Teshuvah gives a third parallel. It is often gradual—that is one reason Elul exists—but the tradition also knows moments in which a life reorganizes at once. After hearing the story of Elazar ben Durdayya, Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi says that one person acquires his world in many years and another “in one hour.” Maimonides describes the penitent as changing his name, as if to say: I am another person; I am not the one who did those deeds.[12] Months of work culminate in a discontinuous self.

Even the calendar bears this out. In Biblical times the year turned not when a calendar said so but when witnesses testified to the new moon and the court proclaimed it—the moon’s wavefunction, we might say, had collapsed. Until that moment there was no new year; after it, there was.

And then there is the barrier. A better state may already be visible and still fail to happen by itself. Habit, self-conception, unfinished obligations, and reluctance to accept sovereignty over oneself hold the old state in place. That is the spiritual analogue of metastability: the new state is possible, but the old one still has inertia.

Elul: Nucleating the New Year

A first-order transition usually begins locally. A tiny patch of the new phase appears inside the old. If it is too small, it disappears; if it grows large and stable enough, it spreads.[13] This is nucleation, and it gives Elul its most fruitful physical parallel.

Nucleation

The customary daily shofar of Elul now takes on a natural role. It is not yet the Torah-commanded shofar of Rosh HaShanah; it is preparation, awakening.[14] Each morning we plant a small seed of the coming coronation inside the outgoing year. Selichot do the same. So do apology, restitution, cheshbon ha-nefesh—taking stock of one’s deeds—and resolutions. The flaws we repent of are the nucleation sites: physics nucleates at defects, and “where the penitents stand, the perfectly righteous cannot stand.”[15] The seeds are planted in the old year, and there they grow the new one.

A seed, however, has to survive. Anyone who has made a New Year’s resolution knows how easily a sincere inspiration melts back into habit. Maimonides asks for something more substantial: a resolution so firm that the Knower of hidden things can testify that the person will not return to the sin.[16] Elul is not only for having a good thought. It is for giving that thought enough structure to live.

The King in the field

Here the Alter Rebbe’s parable of the King in the field becomes especially powerful. During Elul anyone may approach the King; He receives all graciously and shows a smiling countenance. In the palace, access is restricted. The Rebbe emphasizes that this revelation reaches even those who are far away, but it does not do their work for them. It makes approach possible; the person must still walk out to meet the King.[17]

A transition becomes easier when the new phase has a favorable place to begin. The King in the field does not carry us into the new year; He lowers the barrier—the difficulty of beginning. The Thirteen Attributes of Mercy deepen the thought: mercy does not erase the need for teshuvah; it makes return possible precisely where merit has failed.[18] In phase-transition language, Elul flattens the energy landscape before the year itself changes.

One more consequence. A kingdom cannot consist of isolated beginnings. Ein melech b’lo am: there is no king without a people. The many local acts of Elul—one person apologizing, another resolving, another stirred by this morning’s shofar—must finally join in a communal act of coronation. The new year is nucleated in individuals, but Kingship is crowned by a people.

Psalm 27

If the shofar is a seed, Psalm 27, I think, is something slightly different: a seed crystal, a template. A seed crystal does more than trigger crystallization; it selects which form grows, and it stays in contact with the crystal until growth is complete.[19] The psalm enters the liturgy in Elul and remains through Hoshana Rabbah, and the Midrash reads “the Lord is my light” as Rosh HaShanah, “my salvation” as Yom Kippur, and “He will shelter me in His sukkah” as Sukkot.[20] The whole coming season is already present in it in miniature. If a seed says “begin,” a seed crystal says, “grow like this.”

And then comes the last verse: “Hope in the Lord; be strong and let your heart take courage; and hope in the Lord” (Psalm 27:14). Why twice? The Talmud says that if a person prayed and was not answered, let him pray again.[21] Nucleation is a statistics of repeated attempts. Most fluctuations die; the transition occurs because the system keeps trying until one becomes self-sustaining. Elul does not require the first awakening to be perfect. It asks us to keep trying until the awakening acquires structure.

From Inscription to Sealing

A transition is not finished at the instant it begins. Once a new phase appears, it has to spread. That gives us a natural way to read the days from Rosh HaShanah to Yom Kippur.

Figure 2. The season as a process: Elul prepares; Rosh HaShanah inscribes; the Ten Days let the change take hold; Yom Kippur seals it.

Rosh HaShanah is the moment of inscription: the new year is established. Its two days, treated in halakhah as one long day, belong to a single transition.[22] But inscription is not sealing. The Ten Days of Teshuvah are the interval in which the decision is worked into the parts of life that have not yet changed. Yom Kippur is the seal.

Anyone who has made a sincere Rosh HaShanah resolution knows the experience. One crowns the King in earnest and discovers on the third of Tishrei that an old resentment, an unpaid debt, or a stubborn habit is exactly where it was. The year is new, but we are not. That does not make the resolution unreal; it means that a decision made at the center still has to reach the edges.

What Is Fixed—and What Remains Open

A theological question follows. If life, sustenance, and the rest are decided between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, what is the rest of the year for? Why pray on Rosh Chodesh, the New Moon? Why pray daily at all? The Talmud says that a person’s sustenance is allotted from Rosh HaShanah to Yom Kippur;[23] elsewhere the sages speak of judgment yearly, seasonally, daily, even hourly.[24] The tradition itself refuses to turn the year into a frozen script.

Chabad teachings describe a hierarchy. A general vitality is drawn down on Rosh HaShanah and sealed on Yom Kippur, but it is still undifferentiated—a general allotment of vitality and blessing, like pluripotent stem cells that can still become neurons, muscle, skin, or bone. That undifferentiated energy is then particularized through the service of each Rosh Chodesh, and from there through days and hours, when it can be channeled into health, children, or sustenance.[25] The whole is given first; its form is shaped later, by our prayers.

Physics offers a simple picture of how that can be. When water freezes, the crystal acquires an overall order, but that does not fix every microscopic detail. Ordinary ice still admits many arrangements of its hydrogen atoms within the same crystalline framework; Pauling showed in 1935 how to count this surviving freedom, and measurement confirmed his count.[26] The large-scale state is settled while many small-scale possibilities remain open.

That, I think, dissolves the apparent contradiction. Rosh HaShanah can be the “head” of the year without being a screenplay for every day that follows. The annual decree sets the broad conditions and the measure of vitality; the lived history is still shaped by prayer, choice, and the monthly unfolding of that blessing. Determined does not mean fully specified.[27]

The First Coronation

Let me end where creation begins. According to Vayikra Rabbah, the world was created on the twenty-fifth of Elul, and Adam and Eve on the first of Tishrei—Rosh HaShanah—when they were judged in the eleventh hour and pardoned in the twelfth.[28]

For five days there was an ordered cosmos but no creature capable of recognizing sovereignty and choosing to proclaim it. Chasidic teaching therefore reads Adam’s first act of worship as the first coronation.[29] He calls to creation: “Come, let us bow down… before the Lord, our Maker” (Psalms 95:6). He does not create G-d’s sovereignty; he brings creation into a relation in which that sovereignty is consciously acknowledged. Adam is one local beginning, but his recognition does not stay local: he calls the rest of creation with him. The first five days were a world waiting for that relation. Adam was its nucleus. That is why the liturgy can call Rosh HaShanah “the beginning of Your works, a remembrance of the first day,” though Adam was created on the sixth.[30] The beginning is relational, not merely chronological: for the first time, the world can answer its Creator.

Elul asks us to do the same: to begin the new year inside the old one—in the daily shofar, in selichot, in Psalm 27, in a resolution given enough substance to survive. Rosh HaShanah renews the relation; the Ten Days let the decision take hold; Yom Kippur seals it. Even then the future is not a script. The broad form of the year has been given, but the year itself still has to be lived.

The shofar has sounded, and the King has returned to His palace. The seeds planted in Elul are in the ground. These Ten Days are for letting them take hold—for carrying the decision made at the center out to the edges, where the old habits still live—and for joining our private beginnings into what a coronation requires: not isolated subjects, but a people.

Gmar chatimah tovah—may you and yours be sealed for a good and sweet year, and a year of redemption.

[1] Mishnah, Rosh HaShanah 4:5–6; Babylonian Talmud, Rosh HaShanah 16a.

[2] 1 Kings 1:39; cf. 2 Kings 9:13 and 11:14.

[3] The liturgy calls this day “the birthday of the world”; Adam and Eve were created on it, and the world, the sages explain, exists for humanity’s sake.

[4] Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, Tanya, Igeret HaKodesh, epistle 14.

[5] Rabbeinu Bechaye on Genesis 38:30, the beginning of Balak, and Kad HaKemach; Tanya, Sha’ar HaYichud VehaEmunah, ch. 7.

[6] This begs the question how a perfect G-d can lack anything. I address it in “Why Did G-d Create the World?” QuantumTorah.com, August 17, 2026.

[7] Tanya, Sha’ar HaYichud VehaEmunah, ch. 1.

[8] Rema, Orach Chaim 581:3, and Magen Avraham ad loc. The interregnum reading is homiletic.

[9] E.g., Serge Galam, Sociophysics (Springer, 2012). In “Thermodynamics of Revolution: Iran at the Tipping Point,” SSRN, February 27, 2026, I argued that regime change is a first-order transition requiring nucleation, and predicted that bombing alone would not produce one. Sadly, history proved me right.

[10] L. D. Landau, “On the Theory of Phase Transitions” (1937). See, e.g., my “Exodus as a First-Order Phase Transition,” QuantumTorah.com, January 31, 2026.

[11] Pure micrometre-scale droplets can be supercooled to about −40 °C; H. R. Pruppacher and J. D. Klett, Microphysics of Clouds and Precipitation (Kluwer, 1997).

[12] Babylonian Talmud, Avodah Zarah 17a; Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Teshuvah 2:4.

[13] Classical nucleation theory: R. Becker and W. Döring, Ann. Phys. 416 (1935): 719.

[14] Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer, ch. 46, cited in Tur, Orach Chaim 581; Shulchan Aruch and Rema, Orach Chaim 581:1.

[15] Babylonian Talmud, Berachot 34b.

[16] Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Teshuvah 2:2.

[17] Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, Likkutei Torah, Re’eh 32b (Ani LeDodi); Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, Ani LeDodi 5726, sec. 3.

[18] Exodus 34:6–7; Babylonian Talmud, Rosh HaShanah 17b.

[19] In the Czochralski process for growing semiconductor crystals, a seed crystal dipped into the melt sets the structure of the whole ingot and remains attached until growth is complete.

[20] Midrash Tehillim 27:1; Elef LaMateh on Mateh Efraim 581:6. Chabad recites the psalm through Hoshana Rabbah.

[21] Babylonian Talmud, Berachot 32b.

[22] Babylonian Talmud, Beitzah 4b–5a; Rosh HaShanah 18a.

[23] Babylonian Talmud, Beitzah 16a.

[24] Babylonian Talmud, Rosh HaShanah 16a.

[25] Likkutei Torah, Derushim le-Rosh HaShanah, 58a; Derech Mitzvotecha, Mitzvat Ha’amanat Elokut, sec. 12.

[26] Linus Pauling, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 57 (1935): 2680; W. F. Giauque and J. W. Stout, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 58 (1936): 1144.

[27] See Rebbe Rashab, Kuntres Uma’ayan (Kehot, 1944).

[28] Vayikra Rabbah 29:1; cf. Babylonian Talmud, Rosh HaShanah 10b–11a.

[29] Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer, ch. 11; Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, Rosh HaShanah discourses.

[30] Rosh HaShanah Musaf; cf. Babylonian Talmud, Rosh HaShanah 27a.

This is an abridged version of the article published in QuantumTorah.com on Sep.11, 2026.