The Woman in the Moon

Take a drive out of town one moonless night. You probably don’t have to go too far to get away from the ambient light and find yourself under a sky so black that, if not for the stars, you might think you’ve lost your vision.

Now cue the moon. That first sliver of light making its way to you, after traveling 93 million miles from the sun, captured by our cratered celestial mirror, and tossed over to Earth where it catches your eye another quarter of a million miles away.  That’s Rosh Chodesh, the new moon that resets the Jewish calendar and begins the marking of another month.

For as long as Jews have observed Rosh Chodesh, the day (sometimes two days) has been designated as a holiday for Jewish women. Our tradition teaches that when Moshe told the Jews that he was going up to Mount Sinai for 40 days to learn Torah from God, the Jews, waiting anxiously below, miscounted the days. They thought that the time for Moshe’s return had passed and that he was dead. Turning to Aharon, Moshe’s brother, to fill the void, Aharon called for everyone to contribute their jewelry, which was smelted and from which emerged the Golden Calf. An idolatrous act so brazenly unfaithful that God’s obliteration of the Jewish People was very nearly certain, a fate narrowly averted through Moshe’s intervention. The women, though, did not willingly offer their jewelry towards this fiasco, and as a reward, Rosh Chodesh is their holiday.

Several rabbis anticipated and tried to answer your question, “Why is designating Rosh Chodesh as a woman’s holiday a fitting reward for withholding their jewelry to create the Golden Calf?”

One response that intuits an intrinsic connection between women and the new moon is that of the Or Zarua (Isaac ben Moses of Vienna, 13^th century), who hears the word Chadash (new) in Rosh Chodesh. Just as a woman is anticipated as “new” by her husband at the conclusion of her monthly cycle, the Jewish People eagerly anticipate the moon’s monthly renewal.

This suggestion falls short in a couple of ways. It removes the capacity of a woman to internalize and value her natural power of renewal and delegates that determination to her husband, if she has one. And more to the point, what is the connection of a woman’s biological renewal to the Golden Calf episode?

Here is how I see it.

The failure of Jewish men at the foot of Mount Sinai was their abandoning any hope that Moshe would re-appear. Although they believed that they counted the days towards his promised return correctly, they despaired at the very instant that their anticipation was unfulfilled. The women, however, held on and resisted contributing to the creation of the Golden Calf, because they understood hiddenness. They understood the hiddenness of the moon as intimately as they understood the hiddenness of life within them. For the women, Moshe’s hiddenness was like that of the moon. His absence did not equate to his disappearance. Although moonlight is sometimes absent from the sky, the moon is there. If we just wait, moonlight will once again shine upon us. The faith that Jewish women had in Moshe’s re-appearance was as firm as the unshakable scientific certainty that the moon renews itself. That lunar renewal, observed as Rosh Chodesh, is therefore dedicated as a tribute to Jewish women.

Rosh Chodesh Cheshvan is upon us. Following the month of Tishrei, which is super-saturated with holidays, Cheshvan is so achingly empty of holidays that it is called Mar (Bitter) Cheshvan. But in truth, Rosh Chodesh Cheshvan itself heralds a celebration as hidden as the moon. A holiday that honors Jewish women around the world, a world in an eternal dance with the woman in the moon.