A new king (melech chadash) arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph. (Exodus 1:8)
In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month (chodesh), on the seventeenth day of the month (chodesh), on that day All the fountains of the great deep burst apart, And the floodgates of the sky broke open. (Genesis 7:11)
When you build a new house (bayit chadash), you shall make a parapet for your roof, so that you do not bring bloodguilt on your house if anyone should fall from it. (Deuteronomy 22:8)
They sacrificed to demons, no-gods, Gods they had never known, New ones (chadashim), who came but lately, Who stirred not your forebears' fears. (Deuteronomy 32:17)
This month (ha-chodesh hazeh) shall mark for you the beginning of the months (rosh chadashim); it shall be the first of the months of the year (l’chadshei hashana) for you. (Exodus 12:1)
And you are to number for yourselves, from the morrow of the Sabbath, from the day that you bring the elevated sheaf, seven Sabbaths-of-days, whole [weeks] are they to be; until the morrow of the seventh Sabbath you are to number—fifty days, then you are to bring near a grain-gift (mincha chadasha) of new-crops to the Lord. (Leviticus 23:15-16)
You shall eat old grain long stored, and you shall have to clear out the old to make room for the new (mipnai chadash). (Leviticus 26:10)
Sing to the Lord a new song (shira chadasha), Praise from the ends of the earth—You who sail the sea and you creatures in it, You coastlands and their inhabitants! (Isaiah 42:10)
The Biblical word for “new,” chadash, appears for the first time in the opening chapter of Exodus. “A new king arose over Egypt…” The arrival of this king signals not just an ominous regime change, but a fundamental teaching about novelty itself. Consider how we encounter newness in our own time - we are constantly urged to upgrade, update, and embrace the latest innovation. Like the Israelites confronting an unknown Pharaoh, we too face the destabilizing forces of change, especially when we don't see them coming.
This dynamic plays out dramatically in Deuteronomy, where Moses critiques the people for their “recency bias.” Their error is not simply the worship of false gods, but their attraction to what is newly released - as if scrolling through a Netflix carousel of “Trending Now” deities, each one promising novel forms of meaning. This appetite for novelty, the Torah suggests, can lead us dangerously astray.
The Biblical law to build a parapet applies specifically to new houses, a detail that rewards closer examination. Why only the new house? An older structure might seem more likely to need additional safety features. But perhaps the Torah is less concerned with the physical structure than with the psychology of the builder. The owner of a new house, flush with achievement, might be prone to overlook vulnerability precisely when it most needs attention. The parapet requirement thus becomes not just a safety regulation but a spiritual technology - a concrete reminder that innovation demands heightened rather than diminished awareness of risk. Denying vulnerability, the Torah suggests, makes us more susceptible to a fall than acknowledging it.
The shoresh, or root meaning, of chadash is chodesh, month. Often the two look the same, as chodesh is spelled without an explicit vav. The Torah makes the connection between new and month explicit in the figure of the new month, marked by the new moon. Jewish law concerns the protocol for identifying the new moon, and thus the new month. A month means a new month, marked by a new moon, but also the rhythm of novelty in the midst of repetition—the moon comes and goes; months themselves roll up to the year (shana), which means change (shinui) and repetition or even recitation (mishne). The first of Nisan, the month during which we celebrate Pesach, is the new year of the months.
Genesis 7 marks our first encounter with the concept of month—and thus our first glimpse of the literary double of the new. That this occurs precisely as the flood begins is no accident. The text measures time not by cosmic standards but through Noah's lived experience: “in the six hundredth year of Noah's life.” This anchoring of unprecedented catastrophe in personal time suggests something profound about how we encounter radical change. While Noah himself may not have measured time this way, the narrator introduces the monthly cadence just as the known world dissolves. Like the oppressive king of Exodus who “knew not Joseph,” the flood represents an absolute break with what came before. Yet the text insists on framing even this rupture within the rhythm of measured time, as if suggesting that our response to radical newness must begin with creating structures to contain it.
Yet the Torah’s treatment of newness isn’t uniformly cautionary. After establishing the dangers of uncontrolled change, the text offers us a different model of encountering the new. Consider the mincha chadasha, the offering of new grain that marks the culmination of the Omer. Here, newness emerges not as sudden rupture but as the fruit of careful counting, of marking each day's subtle transformation. The offering becomes possible only after seven complete weeks of attention—forty-nine days of preparing ourselves to receive what's novel.
This patient approach to newness finds its echo in God's promise in Leviticus: the people will have such abundance of new grain that they’ll need to clear out the old to make room. But notice the sequence: the new doesn't simply replace the old. Instead, the text describes a moment of overlap, when both old and new grain occupy the same space. This image evokes what Mortimer Adler called “the great conversation” - the way genuine innovation emerges not from wholesale rejection of tradition but from deep dialogue with it. Like participants in that eternal conversation, the text suggests that authentic renewal requires the wisdom to discern what to preserve and what to clear away, the capacity to recognize how the new might enhance rather than erase what came before. These positive instances of newness in the Torah serve to rectify the original traumatic encounter with novelty in Egypt.
The Omer’s trajectory—from leaving Egypt to receiving Torah—mirrors our larger journey in relating to newness. The counting begins in flight from Pharaoh’s arbitrary power, from newness as pure disruption. It culminates at Sinai, where the people encounter a radically new kind of revelation. But this newness, unlike Pharaoh's, doesn't emerge from historical amnesia (“who knew not Joseph”). Instead, it grows from deep engagement with the past—the God of their ancestors becomes their God through their own direct experience. The new grain offering thus marks more than agricultural renewal; it celebrates the transformation of our relationship to novelty itself. What began in terror of the new king ends in the capacity to embrace divine newness at Sinai.
When Ecclesiastes declares “there is nothing new under the sun,” perhaps we can understand this not as negating the possibility of newness, but as pointing us toward a deeper truth about how we encounter it. The basic patterns of life - growth and decay, joy and sorrow, abundance and lack - indeed repeat themselves across generations. But our relationship to these patterns, our stance toward them, can be genuinely new.
This insight is embedded in the Torah's treatment of “chadash.” Consider the striking contrast between Pharaoh's destabilizing newness and the new grain offering that marks the completion of the Omer. One arrives without warning, creating rupture; the other emerges through conscious preparation, through daily counting, through intimate attention to time’s unfolding. The Omer teaches us that we can transform volatility from an enemy into an ally through preparation and awareness.
The God encountered at Sinai embodies this tension between rupture and continuity - simultaneously the God of the ancestors and yet radically new. This is not the manufactured novelty of Egypt’s “new king,” who represented mere political discontinuity, but rather a newness that emerges precisely through engaging with what endures. Perhaps this is why preparation - whether through counting the Omer, building a parapet, or clearing space for new grain - becomes central to authentic religious experience. It teaches us that genuine newness isn’t found in the rupture itself, but in our cultivated capacity to meet it, to find within apparent chaos the possibility of revelation.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins