Those That Wax And Wane – Those That Stay The Same: Calendrical Reflections.
The sun rises and the sun sets and hastens to the place where it rises yet again ……What will be has been; what will be done has been done; there is nothing new under the sun! (Kohelet 1:5, 1:9)
To the moon He said that it should be renewed as a crown of splendour for those ….destined to be renewed like it (waxing moon blessing, ArtScroll Siddur p. 612)
The Gregorian Calendar
Named after pope Gregory, the civil calendar used in all Western societies today superseded the Julian calendar in which the christian Easter had drifted away from the vicinity of the vernal equinox. Put simply, Gregory knocked ten days off the calendar in October 1582 and, in order to rectify the Julian drift, did away with leap years in any centurial-year (1700, 1800, 1900) not divisible by 400. It remained a strictly solar calendar based on the unchanging cycle of the earth’s movement around the sun; its months are not months in the true sense of the word as their lengths were randomly chosen and have absolutely nothing to do with the cycle of the moon.
Thus, the pinch and the punch notwithstanding, there is absolutely no astronomical significance to the first of the civil month. The calendar’s modus operandi is a simple, regular, predictable one; its calendar-dates rotate annually through the seven-day week, for example, since January 1st 2015 fell on a Thursday, January 1st 2016 was a Friday. Because 2016 was a leap year with an extra day in February – which occurs quadrennially – January 1st 2017 skipped one day and fell out on a Sunday. Thus every 28 years (7×4) the cycle will repeat itself with only the centurial years creating a miniscule blip in the perennial pattern.
Proposed Calendar Reform
What journalists call ‘the silly season’ – the December/January holiday period – has once again thrown up what is probably a ‘non-story’ but nevertheless one which reveals much about the solar calendar’s essential nature.
The Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar is a proposal developed by two Johns Hopkins University staffers. (Presumably they are underworked and overpaid!) Under their projected overhaul, each year would be identical to the one before. Thus any given calendar date would fall on the same day of the week every year. By its advocates’ own admission, this calendar would fall far short of the accuracy of the present civil calendar but this does not matter to them as it would be “much more convenient”. New calendars and diaries wouldn’t have to be designed each year as every year would be the same.
Under this proposal, two 30-day months would be followed by a month of 31 days, Thus every quarter would be of identical length. Four quarters each of 91 days would comprise the 364-day standard year. In order to make up the astronomic shortfall (it takes the earth approximately 365.25 days to circumnavigate the sun) an extra “leap week” – which they tritely call “Xtr” – would have to be added every five or six years. The prospect of an entire one-year-in-six week of “February 29ths” has not gone down well with those with birthdays on their mind. Nor has the prospect of birthdays occurring on the same day of the week every year. All in all it is a safe bet that our present calendar won’t be changing any time soon!
The More Things Change The More They Stay The Same!
The most damning indictment of the proposed Hanke-Henry calendar – judging by some comments I viewed online – is not that it is astronomically inaccurate but that it is insufferably boring and monotonous. Yet its devisors – and no doubt others – see its predictability as its principal strength!
This should not surprise us. King Solomon’s observation in Kohelet with which we began was not blithely chosen. The sun, as we view it from an earth perspective, is a symbol of predictability. It rises and sets every day. Its seasonal patterns of movement at any point in the globe are unchanging and will remain so until a time known only to G-D.
It was the French journalist, novelist and critic Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (1808-1890) who coined the term plus ca change plus c’est la meme chose – “the more things change the more they stay the same”. In a related quote, celebrated English poet Lord Byron (1788-1824) proclaimed “History, with all her volumes vast, hath but one page!” The sun-like patterns of world history have indeed borne out the veracity of these statements. Empires rise, empires set and they are brought down each time by the same toxic mixture of arrogance, lust for power and sense of invincibility because, indeed, to cite another famous quote, “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” (George Santayana 1863-1952).
The Jew And His Calendar
But of course we can learn from the mistakes of history. Judaism has a different saying: Maaseh avot siman la-banim (most often cited by Ramban). “The deeds of our ancestors are a signpost to their children”. We can learn quintessentially from the key figures of our history what to do and what not to do; when to emulate and when to deviate. Judaism enshrines the old but also embraces the new.
No Jewish institution encapsulates this idea better than our calendar!
The Jewish calendar is lunisolar. Because Pesach, Shavuot and Succot are, by Torah definition, seasonal festivals, it needs to keep aligned with the sun – thus within any given 19-year cycle our calendar will re-align with the solar, civil calendar. (For details, readers may refer to the essay on Sidra Bo in my book In Heaven’s Name Why.).
But our calendar’s basic building blocks, its months, are strictly lunar. Unlike the civil months there is a real, astronomic significance to the first of every Jewish month. It is the New Moon. It symbolises renewal.
Fascinatingly the moon does not appear to us in the sky in the same unchanging way as the sun. Indeed, astronomers term the moon “inconstant”. (Of course that is from our limited perspective – as the Psalmist says “He established them [the sun and moon] forever; He issued a decree that will not change [Psalms 148:6]). Depending on its distance from Earth at any given time – which varies from perigee (least distant) to apogee (most distant) – the moon can appear higher or lower in the sky and more or less bright!
If the Gregorian civil calendar – a relatively simple one as has been said – was a considerable feat of accuracy in the late-16th century it cannot remotely compare either in complexity of scope or in brilliance of accuracy to the Jewish calendar devised by Hillel II more than 1,200 years earlier. Our calendar has six varying lengths and fourteen variant patterns (kviot). Thus there is no simple regularity. If we will live to 120, we shall come nowhere near experiencing a repetition of the Jewish calendrical cycle. The calendar almost replicates itself every 247 years – except for an excess of 50 minutes! So the calendar actually repeats itself every 36,288 cycles, i.e. 689,472 years!
Obviously, this is just a theoretical construct. Mashiach will surely have arrived long before the year becomes five digits long, let alone six! However it does illustrate what an unimaginably stupendous feat of intellect and wisdom our calendar is – constructed nearly two millennia prior to the computer age!
The Jewish calendar is thus, for us, forever new. Every decade will throw up a new sequence of dates. Recently we went through a five-year spell when the first day of Pesach fell on a Shabbat four times. No-one can recall when that last happened. It will not happen again in the normal lifespan of anyone reading this article.
The waning and waxing of the moon symbolises Jewish labour pains and renewal. Its constant inconstancy epitomises the unpredictability, the excitement, the amazing, wondrous newness of Jewish living. Our G-D is a living G-D, our soul is a living soul and we are charged with the lifetime task of constant self-renewal.
Gut tsu zein a Yied! How good it is to be Jewish! The very antithesis of boredom.
An Aside: The Constant Renewal of Jewish Marriage
A long-in-the-tooth, bored husband was once asked how many years he had been married. He replied only half in jest and with a telling yawn: “One year – but that same year has been played out forty-two times!” (Source apocryphal).
No observant Jewish couple would conceivably answer that way. Rather than just measure their marriage by years, their union will be governed by the calendar month and the woman’s menstrual cycle. For half the month they will be lovers; for the other half (when intimacy is proscribed assuming a menstrual period) close, platonic companions. They will learn not only to love each other as man and woman but to respect and value each other as best friends. Their marriage on earth, like the moon in the heavens, will experience the excitement of constant renewal.
A New Interpretation of Am Yisrael’s First Mitsva
We have endeavoured to show that while the solar, year-based calendar is sedentary, predictable and conventional, the Jewish, month-based calendar is vigorous, complex, extraordinary and irregular. Fascinatingly, the sacred Hebrew tongue reflects this. While the word shana (year) is related to yashan meaning ‘old’, the word chodesh (month) derives from a root chadash meaning ‘new’!
One of the key verses in this week’s sidra is ha-chodesh ha-zah lakhem rosh chodashim – “this month (of the Exodus) shall be for you the first of the count of months” (Exodus 12:2). This is in fact the first mitsva addressed to Am Yisrael and is, Rashi says, the verse with which the Torah would have commenced were the Torah merely a book of laws.
However, in the light of the foregoing, we can now advance an exciting new interpretation: “This renewal (your redemption from Egyptian slavery and your birth as a nation) will be for you the first of many renewals”. There will be setbacks along the way, there will be troughs as well as peaks, your influence on the world stage will wax and wane ….but just when your moon is practically invisible, the ultimate renewal, the greatest of them all, will unfold ….. and the bright light of your brightest perigee moon will be embraced by the divine light of the glorious Messianic dawn for all humanity.
May it please G-D be soon!