A calendar is really a pretty simple thing; a collection of days, weeks, & months collected onto some sort of grid, paper or electronic, in such a way that it can be used to mark time & track data. Aside from the presentation aspects, calendars only require two things: a clock by which to track time & a special moment or event from when time is measured.
For example, our Gregorian calendar uses the sun as a clock to mark off days & years with months & weeks defined as collections of days. The numbering of Christian years is reckoned from the death of the Christian messiah. In contrast, the Islamic calendar uses the sun as a clock to count days but uses the moon to track the months. In this calendar, the years & weeks are the derived periods of time. The numbering of Islamic years is reckoned from the Islamic prophet’s journey from Mecca to Medina. Our Jewish calendar is a hybrid which uses the sun to track days & years while using the moon to track the months.
Our modern Jewish calendar differs from the others in one other remarkable aspect. While the Islamic & Christian calendars reckon years & eras from an event that is significant in the life of its people, the Jewish calendar counts the years & eras from the creation of the world. That is, the Jewish calendar sports a theocentric rather than homocentric origin. However, this was not always the case.
The Mekilta d’Rabbi Ishmael, Tractate Bahodesh observes that from the time of Moses until the building of Solomon’s Temple, years were measured from the Exodus, from the month that Israel left Egypt. After the building of the Temple, years were reckoned from that event. However, after the fall of Jerusalem, they counted years first from the destruction of the Temple & later according to the reign of the Persian kings.
While such a reckoning is reasonable, given Judea’s status as part of the Persian empire, the midrash suggests (somewhat graphically) that this abandonment of Jewish eras became a source of tribulation to the Jews. I think that the ancient sages were on to something. How a society marks time is a reflection of how that society views the world & in the embracing of a foreign calendar, betokens an adoption of those foreign principles & values on which the foreign calendar is based. This, logically & inevitably, leads to a fading of the principles & values once held by the society &, under the right circumstances, lead to a vanishing of the group all together.
The callousness of modern American Jewry, with regard to prayer & holy days is, in part, fueled by our abandonment of the Jewish calendar. Like the Persian Jews of old, it is reasonable for us to operate on the modern Gregorian (Christian) Calendar. However, the price for doing so is steep. Sabbath becomes a time to get our hair & nails done or, perhaps, a bit of shopping. Rosh Hashanah becomes a one day observance. Fasting on the Fast of Av becomes unimportant as does Hoshana Rabba & Shemini Atzeret. We worry more about the length & frequency of religious services than the devotion to God that those services represent.
Even worse, we begin to value foreign holy days, such as Christmas & Easter, as times off more than revering the festivals that God has created specifically for us. Many Jews know more about Lent or Ramadan than they do about Sefirat HaOmer or the Aseret Yemai Teshuvah. (If you don’t know what these terms mean, then you serve to prove my point!) Religious school administrators rob our children of precious days away from class, away from learning Torah, because it interferes with some secular or non-Jewish observance. Is it any wonder that our children become vulnerable to the proselytizing of other cultures? We have denuded them of their greatest defense - knowledge.
I think it is time for all of us to pay more attention to the Jewish calendar; to become intimate with the flow & ebb of Jewish time. I think it fundamental for the American Jewish community to overcome its inertia & to become as familiar with Tishre & Nisan as it is with November & January. I think that American Judaism’s descent into oblivion can be stemmed by devoting as much attention to the festivals & holy days of our own calendar as we do to the calendar of others. At the very least, we would all become better, more observant Jews.
This coming month, we will celebrate the American holiday of Thanksgiving. We should, it is a good day to celebrate. May you all have a joyous & blessed Thanksgiving. However, the zeal & passion that we exhibit for this day of thanking our Creator, should not have been reserved for this day alone. If you like Thanksgiving, why not celebrate eight days of it in Tishre with equal gusto?
Shalom uverakha (peace and blessing),
Rabbi Ronald B. Kopelman
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