The Hebrew calendar has preserved the Jewish people through the ages. More than a mere calendar akin to all others, the Hebrew calendar, the Jewish calendar, is a work of art.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Hebrew calendar is not a lunar calendar. It is certainly not a solar calendar. It is a lunar and solar calendar.
The lunar calendar is 354 days long; the solar calendar is 365 days long.
In the Hebrew calendar, while months are dictated by the moon (lunar), it is the sun (solar) that dictates the seasons – hence, the lunar/solar definition.
The calendar, which is 354 days long, contains an extra month that is added seven times in 19 years to keep the solar-lunar schedule in sync.
There is a metabolism to Jewish life, and it is the calendar that drives that metabolism. The holidays and the seasons are clearly delineated. They are the benchmarks of the Jewish year.
Passover, as prescribed by the Torah, must always fall in the spring. Sukkot must always be celebrated in the fall. And year after year, throughout the millennia, they follow that prescription.
The same cannot be said for the Muslim calendar, a fully lunar calendar. That is why the month-long fast of Ramadan sometimes falls in the fall and other times in the summer, when the days – and hence the fast – are much longer.
In fact, interestingly, when a Muslim and a Jew are born on the same day, the Muslim chronologically ages faster than the Jew. Those 11 days make a difference. That correction allows Jews to celebrate our holidays in their proper season.
Long ago, every new Jewish month would be determined by an announcement from two eyewitnesses. The announcement was transmitted through lit pyres traveling toward Babylonia.
That explains why, to this day, Diaspora Jews celebrate two-day-long holidays.
Our enemies, hell-bent on destroying us, understood the importance of our calendar far better than most Jews do today.
To that end, the Syrian Greeks, the Seleucids, banned the announcement of Rosh Hodesh, the new moon. They knew that without knowing the correct days and months, dates for the holidays could not be set, and Jewish life would fall apart.
That was part of the Hanukkah story, the time when brit milah, circumcision, and Shabbat were banned. Why, you might ask?
Announcing the month versus brit milah and Shabbat? It seems so inconsequential, and yet, it is so vitally integral for our Jewish metabolism.
While the message by bonfire took only minutes, not hours or days, to reach from Jerusalem to Babylonia, when the bonfires were sabotaged by anti-Jewish groups, their accuracy fell into question.
A calendar of memory and mourning
The solution was to send the monthly announcements via pony express.
The Hebrew calendar cycles from celebration to mourning. The quintessential time of happiness is Passover, while the lowest and saddest period of the year is the stretch leading to, and then culminating in the destruction of the Temple on the ninth of Av.
That time period, known as The Three Weeks, is one of the most cogent examples we have of the link between our Hebrew calendar and our Jewish metabolism.
Nissan, the month during which Passover is celebrated, is the month of freedom. It is the month in which the exodus from Egypt took place. It is a period of happiness and joy – so much so that eulogies are prohibited during Nissan.
The Hebrew months of Tammuz and Av emphasize the centrality of the Temple in Jerusalem. Three fast days commemorate the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians in 586 BCE and at the hands of the Romans in 70 CE.
The siege around Jerusalem began on the 10th of the Hebrew month of Tevet. The walls were breached on the 17th of Tammuz, and both the First and Second Temples were destroyed on the Ninth of Av.
The loss of the Temples was a physical and emotional ripping of the Jewish people and their souls. Through the Hebrew calendar, that experience is relived every year. More than mere days of mourning, they are weeks of mourning.
Jewish historical events were viewed through the prism of the Temple’s destruction. Massacres from the 1st Crusade and the expulsion of the Jews of Spain took place on the Ninth of Av.
World War I began on the Ninth of Av, and deportations from the Warsaw ghetto took place on the Ninth of Av.
That history leads us to the essential point. What happens when a new horrific event befalls the Jewish people during our lifetime, an event like the Holocaust?
Jewishly and rabbinically, the event should be seen through the prism of the Jewish calendar.
And so, the rabbis suggested that Holocaust Remembrance Day be integrated into the Yom Kaddish Klali on the 10th of Tevet – the day determined to commemorate the death of a loved one when you do not know their exact date of death.
When survivors of the ghetto revolts heard of that decision, they went apoplectic. In 1943, those involved in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising had made the decision to time their uprising with Passover, the festival of freedom, and they demanded that Passover be the date of the Holocaust remembrance.
This time the rabbis went berserk, asserting there should be no general mourning during the month of Passover/Nissan!
A compromise was finally reached.
The Knesset decided on the 27th day of Nissan, during the month of Passover, but at the very end. Neither side was happy, but both sides could live with the decision.
In 1951, a member of Knesset, himself a survivor, Rabbi Mordechai Nurock proposed and lobbied for the compromise. The law that followed was called Yom HaZikaron Lashoah Umered Hagetaot, the Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust Ghetto Resistance.
That is how ingrained the heroism of the ghetto fighters was to so many Israelis in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. Before this compromise was reached, in 1949 and 1950, the 10th of Tevet was the Holocaust Memorial date.
Jewish tradition has very detailed activities describing commemoration and memorializing. Thanks to the Hebrew calendar, Jewish history is never abandoned or forgotten. Jews celebrate or commemorate – from destruction to rebirth.
The writer is a columnist and a social and political commentator. Watch his TV show Thinking Out Loud on JBS.