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Living in Two Calendars: Doing Jewish in a Non Jewish World Rosh Hashanah 1St Day, 5780 Rabbi Steven Lewis

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Living in Two Calendars: Doing Jewish in a Non Jewish World Rosh Hashanah 1St Day, 5780 Rabbi Steven Lewis Living in Two Calendars: Doing Jewish in a Non Jewish World Rosh Hashanah 1st Day, 5780 Rabbi Steven Lewis I want to begin with two stories about how a people holds onto its stories. First from the poet Gary Snyder who tells of going to a conference for Native Alaskan leaders. He flies into Anchorage and one of the leaders picks him up at the airport and drives him to the site of the conference several hours to the north. As soon as they leave the airport, the driver who is very knowledgeable about his tradition, begins to point out features in the landscape and tell traditional stories related to each river and mountain. Snyder comments that he was exhausted by the pace of his guide’s stories, they were told quickly and one immediately after the other. Later he realized that these native myths, linked to the homeland, were traditionally told while walking, not driving, through the landscape. Second story, probably apocryphal, told by Professor Isaiah Gafni of Hebrew University: A pious Jew in Russia, let’s call him Yankle, is sentenced to the gulag - a harsh remote prison where any religious observance is strictly forbidden. However, Yankle learns that sometimes prisoners are able to smuggle in one small book. Which book should he try to take? So he asks his Rabbi. “If I can take one Jewish book to keep my connection to the tradition, what should I take?” The rabbi tells him: “Take a calendar. If you know when festivals occur, and are keeping days of communal significance with the rest of the Jewish world you can maintain your identity.” I am going to talk about calendars, the Jewish calendar and THE secular calendar. But I want to start with a question that has no correct answer. In this diverse crowd there will be many different answers. I want to ask you: Do you think of “Jewish” as something you are, or something you do? (And of course you can “do Jewish” without being Jewish - that describes many here who are not Jewish but do Jewish, for example, you’re here.) That’s the question: Is Jewish something you are or something you do? Back to calendars. We live with extraordinary comfort and freedom compared to our ancestors, but what I want to explore is the challenge we face which is like the challenge of poor Yankle: How to do Jewish in an non-Jewish environment. Our environment is not hostile, like the gulag, but is extremely busy and so doing Jewish requires initiative and planning. The background history is that Jewish life, since the destruction of the second Temple in 70AD, is lived in two calendars: the Jewish calendar and the local calendar. (The modern State of Israel is the dramatic exception.) When the Temple was destroyed, the pilgrimages and sacrificial system of biblical religion ended. Rabbinic Judaism, replaced biblical Judaism and transformed 1 the practice of a central temple - The Temple, capital T, in Jerusalem - to a new system that could survive in diaspora. That new Jewish system has lots of prayer and study and mitzvot and acts of loving kindness but no more sacrifices and harvest offerings. No more pilgrimages to Jerusalem. However, one of the key things we took with us into exile was our calendar. Living in two calendars has always been challenging and complicated. It is challenging and complicated because the calendars are profoundly different. The secular and Jewish calendar are both “calendars” the way solitaire and rugby are both “games” - same category, but extremely different. I want to take a moment to talk about the differences. The secular calendar is dominant. In fact, what we call a Jewish calendar is really just a secular calendar with Jewish dates inserted. This leads to all sorts of confusion because, and here’s a first difference between the calendars: despite being in the same box on the calendar, a Jewish day and a secular day do not start and end at the same time. Jewish day begins at sundown. Secular day begins a nanosecond after midnight. You can experience the transition of one Jewish day into the next as a natural phenomenon. We have substantial liturgical tools to mark the transition in the form of the traditional afternoon and evening prayers - good-bye to one day and hello to another. For the secular transition between days you need a watch, or a giant ball in Time Square. That difference makes the standard Hebrew calendar extremely misleading. Despite this, on the Jewish calendar there’s no introduction and instructions - you’re just supposed to know how to use it. We have a lot of that in Judaism unfortunately - things very few people actually understand but lots of people think they’re supposed to understand. This is one reason why it is so healthy to have lots of people in the community who are not Jewish. They are willing to ask the questions the Jews don’t want to ask because they think they’re supposed to already know the answers. Another difference between calendars: Secular calendar is solar and Jewish calendar is Lunisolar - meaning a lunar calendar that corrects for the solar year. Why lunisolar? A lunar year, twelve lunar cycles, is about eleven days shorter than a solar year. So on a purely lunar calendar, as in the Islamic calendar, the festivals are not fixed in any particular season but get earlier each year. We have a lunar calendar that corrects to the seasons. This is necessary because we have three central harvest festivals when the tribes would gather to celebrate the harvest in Jerusalem. The three harvest pilgrimage festivals, “Shalosh Regalim,” - Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot, are the heart of the Jewish Calendar and they have to stay in the proper season. 2 Solar calendar dates are consistent year to year in relation to the sun; where it rises and sets on the horizon, and how long it is in the sky. Hebrew calendar dates are consistent year to year in relation to the moon. The Passover Seder, on the 14th day of the month of Nissan, will always be on the full moon. The festival of Sukkot in two weeks, will always be on a full moon. Rosh Hashanah is the beginning of the Hebrew month of Tishrei so tonight you might see a tiny sliver of new moon set just before sunset. That moon will wax, getting thicker and setting later each night until it is the full moon of Sukkot- rising at sunset and setting at sunrise. The moon is marking Jewish time. When you see it in the sky, you can guess the day of the Hebrew month. So to review, 1) Jewish day begins at sundown, 2) calendar is lunisolar so that our harvest festivals stay at harvest-time; but the big difference in the calendars is their purpose and meaning. The Secular calendar is a tool to help us organize our personal schedules. It is the most useful calendar in human history because it is nearly universal. In the ancient world, when you went to a new place you needed to adopt the local calendar. Now we can plan a trip across the globe ten years from now and expect people will know when we’re arriving to the minute. The calendar is a platform upon which we can make and share our personal schedules. If you purchase a secular calendar it will show Columbus Day and Halloween, Christmas and Easter and maybe even major Jewish and Muslim holidays too. Those dates are there to acknowledge events of religious or cultural significance. Maybe it means something to you, maybe not, the secular calendar, on its own terms, has no expectations or demands. The Jewish calendar is different. To demonstrate this difference, let’s do something very Jewish and go back to the first mention of our calendar in the Torah to see what we find. Exodus chapter twelve. Up until this moment in the Torah we’ve had many many stories and a few genealogies but nothing like a calendar. The story of the Exodus builds from Moses’ birth, and the call to free the Israelites, through nine plagues and increasing conflict and tension with Pharaoh. God announces the last and most terrible plague and suddenly the action stops and we get something totally new: the Hebrew calendar: The LORD said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt: This month shall mark for you the beginning of the months; it shall be the first of the months of the year for you. Speak to the whole community of Israel and say that on the tenth of this month each of them shall take a lamb to a family, a lamb to a household….. etc. The instructions on what to do on the last night in Egypt and first Passover Seder are given and carried out. But, in case you thought that the Seder was just a one time event, the text continues: And when you enter the land that the LORD will give you, as promised, you shall observe this ritual. And when your children ask you, ‘What do you mean by this 3 ritual?’you shall say, ‘It is the passover sacrifice to the LORD, because G-d passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt etc. So the calendar is established in the biblical text to define obligations, affirm our relationship with the community and the Creator-of-the-Universe and to educate our children about our story. This is the essential element: “And when your children ask you, ‘What do you mean by this ritual?’you shall say…” As Sylvia Cohen Religious School student, Emerson Kahle taught at his Bar Mitzvah a few years ago: A calendar allows you to remember events as a way to make sure stories are never lost.
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