Expert: Rabbi Barry Dov Lerner - 9/20/2010

Question
QUESTION: Did Hillel II change the timing of Shabbat? Was it once based on the New Moon? Are we honoring the original Shabbat?
Thanks

ANSWER: Dear Yochanan

Thanks for writing

Shavuah Tov and let it be a shanah tovah

What do you mean by "change the timing of Shabbat" - the actual length of time or the manner in which Shabbat and Rosh Hodesh were determined?

What do you mean by "the original Shabbat?"

Once I understand what you are asking I should be able to help you.

Best wishes

Rabbi Dov

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Shalom Rabbi,

My apologies for not being clear. I was trying to be succinct (I'm not so good at that hehe).

I know Karaites use slightly different calendars (so their Yom Kippur is tomorrow for instance) but I think I understand that one.
I was told from someone I otherwise trust for information that Shabbat, Friday sunset to Saturday sunset, is not the original day. He said that originally Shabbat was lunar-based and hence occurred on different days. So, Sabbath might be on a Thursday one month, a Monday another and a Friday on another. That it too "floats" across the calendar but that that was changed by Rabbi Hillel II to be on Friday-Saturday every week.

If one lived in say 200 B.C.E. would Shabbat be consistently on the same day as the one we call Friday-Saturday?

Thank you

ANSWER: DEAR YOCHANAN,

I'm taking the unusual approach to followup your very kind evaluation of my response for two reasons:

1. Did anyone else you asked - individually or online - suspect the real history of Christianity and missionary efforts in the subject of "lunar Shabbat" observance and calendar formulation?

2. Even more importantly, if you are personally leaning to literal fundamentalism, make sure to consult Orthodox Rabbis andOrthodox Q&A such as Ask Moses or Chabad.

As a traditional, Conservative Rabbi whose doctoral studies focussed on Second Temple and Early Rabbinic Judaism and History, I would encourage you to examine the history of Judaism and interpretation.

Orthodoxy maintains - to a greater or lesser extent - that the Written AND the Oral Torah were revealed at Sinai.  I believe that history demonstrates that most of the Judaism we observe today as traditional yet modern Jews is based upon Torah but reflects Rabbinic interpretation and legislation, across thousands of years and in a myriad of countries and cultures.

To understand the "evolution" of Jewish law and observance requires a competent knowledge of Torah, TaNaKH, Mishnah and Gemarah, and Midrash Halachah and Aggadah and the respective history of each set of texts and commentaries in Jewish tradition. It is for that reason I attended the Seminary wanting to understand "tradition and change" and gave up my undergraduate training in neurophysiological research and an eye to medicine as a lifelong profession and calling. I don't regret the shift in focus one whit.

I would urge you if you want to live a life of both tradition and modernity to study with competent teachers how Judaism literally had to revolutionize its fundamental philosophy and theology after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, when we ceased realistically FROM being Biblical Jews whose centrality was the Temple and the authorities were the Kohanim=Priests TO a Judaism that was interpreted and often legislated by Rabbis=Sages/Teachers who had to accommodate Judaism to a new world, both in Israel and the Diaspora.

Good luck and thank you again for your kind words.

Rabbi Dov


Dear Yochanan,

There is no basis in Jewish history and understanding of the Sabbath as a function of lunar cycles. Judaism has long relied upon a lunar-solar calendar, implemented for a long while by the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem before  the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 CE, in effect long before Hillel II who lived in the mid- 4th century CE, hundreds of years.

In addition, attributing the mathematics and astronomy to Hillel II is not assured as the only reference is allegedly in a responsum of Hai Gaon (c. 1000 CE) and cited by an author in the 12th century! This is a long time after the actual lifetime and functioning of Hillel II. On this issues of who is the "ultimate authority and when was it announced" will have to be left to historical scholars - but right now it is subject to theories and speculation.

I'm appending some information after my signature which will explain that   the Jewish calendar has been refined, the calendar process and accuracy literally evolving over a number of centuries. Do not underestimate our ancestors and the world in which they lived in terms of their mathematical and astronomical talents.

HOWEVER, I am much more concerned with where you heard this issue of the "lunar Sabbath" and Hillel II. I am fairly certain that your "information source" is unfortunately not as educated Jewishly as you trust him/her to be.

I would urge you to speak to a Rabbi who is familiar with the Messianic Hebrew missionaries who urge Jews to "reconsider" their beliefs.

Please understand that a Jew who accepts Jesus or Jesus by any other name is now a Christian. Jews do not accept/believe/etc. Christian beliefs.

Here is just one URL from a missionary/messianic site which I do NOT accept: http://www.lunarsabbath.com/articles/conclusive_evidence.htm
There were many contending such ideas, but not from reliable resources in Judaism.

You must learn the ways in which you can identify messianic Hebrews - who are NOT Jews in the eyes of every existing Jewish movement, Orthodox through Reform - if you are going to protect yourself and also learn  how to deal with messianic willingness to twist the Jewish tradition to meet their own agenda.

One of indications of a messianic is their refusal to observe Yom Kippur because Christians believe in vicarious atonement, for them achieved through their faith in Jesus.

All Jews observe Yom Kippur for atonement to be achieved first by repenting and repairing of all transgressions against other people, and then by repenting directly to God. We do not have anyone "in-between" to achieve atonement.

Furthermore, my google search for "lunar Sabbath" shows nothing but one messianic Christian site after another, confirming my hunch that this was not a reliable source of information. In fact, you may be speaking with either an active missionary or someone himself/herself who has been duped.

Be very careful with your sources of information about Judaism, in person or on line. You should speak with a Rabbi who is also familiar with Christian claims against Judaism, our laws, our books, our rituals and customs.

JewsforJudaism.org is an organization which can be helpful. Your community may have a Jewish Community Relations Council which has resources to sift out legitimate differences within Jewish history and the movements from illegitimate and even missionary or cult efforts.

Best wishes and stay in touch if you run into difficulties finding a reliable source of information.

Just be careful.

Rabbi Dov


"The Jewish calendar is based on three astronomical phenomena: the rotation of the Earth about its axis (a day); the revolution of the moon about the Earth (a month); and the revolution of the Earth about the sun (a year). These three phenomena are independent of each other, so there is no direct correlation between them. On average, the moon revolves around the Earth in about 29½ days. The Earth revolves around the sun in about 365¼ days, that is, about 12.4 lunar months.

The civil calendar used by most of the world has abandoned any correlation between the moon cycles and the month, arbitrarily setting the length of months to 28, 30 or 31 days.

The Jewish calendar, however, coordinates all three of these astronomical phenomena. Months are either 29 or 30 days, corresponding to the 29½-day lunar cycle. Years are either 12 or 13 months, corresponding to the 12.4 month solar cycle.

The lunar month on the Jewish calendar begins when the first sliver of moon becomes visible after the dark of the moon. In ancient times, the new months used to be determined by observation. When people observed the new moon, they would notify the Sanhedrin. When the Sanhedrin heard testimony from two independent, reliable eyewitnesses that the new moon occurred on a certain date, they would declare the rosh chodesh (first of the month) and send out messengers to tell people when the month began.

The problem with strictly lunar calendars is that there are approximately 12.4 lunar months in every solar year, so a 12-month lunar calendar is about 11 days shorter than a solar year and a 13-month lunar is about 19 longer than a solar year. The months drift around the seasons on such a calendar: on a 12-month lunar calendar, the month of Nissan, which is supposed to occur in the Spring, would occur 11 days earlier in the season each year, eventually occurring in the Winter, the Fall, the Summer, and then the Spring again. On a 13-month lunar calendar, the same thing would happen in the other direction, and faster.

To compensate for this drift, the Jewish calendar uses a 12-month lunar calendar with an extra month occasionally added. The month of Nissan occurs 11 days earlier each year for two or three years, and then jumps forward 30 days, balancing out the drift. In ancient times, this month was added by observation: the Sanhedrin observed the conditions of the weather, the crops and the livestock, and if these were not sufficiently advanced to be considered "spring," then the Sanhedrin inserted an additional month into the calendar to make sure that Pesach (Passover) would occur in the spring (it is, after all, referred to in the Torah as Chag he-Aviv, the Festival of Spring!).

A year with 13 months is referred to in Hebrew as Shanah Me'uberet (pronounced shah-NAH meh-oo-BEH-reht), literally: a pregnant year. In English, we commonly call it a leap year. The additional month is known as Adar I, Adar Rishon (first Adar) or Adar Alef (the Hebrew letter Alef being the numeral "1" in Hebrew). The extra month is inserted before the regular month of Adar (known in such years as Adar II, Adar Sheini or Adar Beit). Note that Adar II is the "real" Adar, the one in which Purim is celebrated, the one in which yahrzeits for Adar are observed, the one in which a 13-year-old born in Adar becomes a Bar Mitzvah. Adar I is the "extra" Adar.

In the fourth century, Hillel II established a fixed calendar based on mathematical and astronomical calculations. This calendar, still in use, standardized the length of months and the addition of months over the course of a 19 year cycle, so that the lunar calendar realigns with the solar years. Adar I is added in the 3rd, 6th, 8th, 11th, 14th, 17th and 19th years of the cycle. The current cycle began in Jewish year 5758 (the year that began October 2, 1997). If you are musically inclined, you may find it helpful to remember this pattern of leap years by reference to the major scale: for each whole step there are two regular years and a leap year; for each half-step there is one regular year and a leap year. This is easier to understand when you examine the keyboard illustration below and see how it relates to the leap years above."





---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Shalom Rabbi and thank you for "taking the unusual approach to followup..." Your willingness to help others understand is wonderful! I wish more rabbis did this.

--- You: 1. Did anyone else you asked - individually or online - suspect the real history of Christianity and missionary efforts in the subject of "lunar Shabbat" observance and calendar formulation?

No, no one else mentioned Christians but that web page you linked for me sounds like what he was saying (except he didn't mention anything about the New Testament, except that in the first century it shows that Jesus still kept the "floating sabbath" (according to him).

What you all agreed on (what I meant by that) was that Shabbat has always been Friday-Saturday (whatever the days may have been called historically). And that the changes Rabbi Hillel II made only affected when the other holy days were observed, not Shabbat.

The guy I talked to (I'm going to talk to him again on Thursday and share what I've found), who told me Shabbat "floats," did talk about the "Postponements" a lot (which that Christian web page talks about). From what I understand, they are why the Karaite calendar is a little different from ours.

My understanding is the rabbinic beit din or whoever has the authority to make those kinds of changes and that they were made to preserve the calender after Masada, not to destroy it. So it seems to me this is not a big deal, a couple of days either way after almost 6000 years...

--- You: 2. Even more importantly, if you are personally leaning to literal fundamentalism, make sure to consult Orthodox Rabbis andOrthodox Q&A such as Ask Moses or Chabad.

Thanks. I'm not really "leaning toward fundamentalism" but honoring Shabbat properly on the correct day is very important I think, because the Torah places so much importance on it. That's why I wrote you and others asking. I looked on the Chabad site, they usually have great articles but I didn't find anything on this subject. In fact I found almost nothing about this on any of the Jewish sites I tried. We need to get out more and better information I think. There are a lot of sites teaching lots of things we don't believe in. It is confusing sometimes.

I'll write you occasionally if that OK. The only shul within a couple of hours of my home is Reconstructionist and they don't even seem Jewish to me so I don't have a rabbi to talk to one on one.

Your last couple of paragraphs does raise some questions I've wondered about. You said: "... when we ceased realistically FROM being Biblical Jews... TO a Judaism that was interpreted and often legislated by Rabbis=Sages/Teachers who had to accommodate Judaism to a new world, both in Israel and the Diaspora...."

I know that's true... but it sounds so... I don't know... We had to accommodate Judaism... our faith is still supposed to be based on the Written Torah right? We are supposed to be "Torah Observant" and while that of course includes the Oral Torah it also means the Written. We can't just ignore it. I was always told the Mishna, the rabbis etc. shed light on how to be Jews without the Temple. We can't make the sacrifices anymore so we "sacrifice" our prayers, mitzvot, money etc. But there seems to be a lot of confusion about what to believe. Some Orthodox even say Conservatives, Reform etc. are not even "really" Jews and the rabbis (even the Orthodox ones) seem to disagree so much... I don't think a person needs to be a fundamentalist per'se but where are we supposed to draw the lines? I see the Muslims and the Christians, they seem to clear about what they believe...

What's your view of the Karaite Jews? They claim to follow only the Tanakh but they are pretty different. They don't even light the Shabbat Candles...

Just trying to figure things out.
Thank you rabbi

Yochanan

Answer
Dear Yochanan,

Thanks again for the kind words. They are not assumed but are very welcome.

Regarding your friend, be careful. People often present themselves as "open" to reason, objectivity, proofs, etc. and then one discovers that they are only open to ideas which confirm their own conclusions.

Check out "cognitive dissonance" which is a fancy way of saying that psychologically people look for others to confirm themselves even if they say they are open. It's often why groups form - around a core idea in which they all have a stake, and if that idea were to be proven false would literally be adrift.

That's one of the reasons when I answer questions I try not to undermine someone else's faith or beliefs when they are in conflict with historical Judaism. The reason furthermore I am a Conservative Rabbi and Jew is that I do believe that history is the tool for understanding how Judaism has come to be what it is today, and for me authentic Judaism reflects the history of tradition AND change.

Change can be legislated by a single Rabbi and it is called a "takkanah" subject to acceptance by other scholars and leaders. Change can be a new interpretation within the system of interpreting law and historical texts. Change can be a rejection of something that has come to be because through history and textual analysis we learn that the law in question was created in error.

For example, Solomon Freehoff, z"l, was a great legal authority who also was a prominent teacher at HUC, the Reform seminary in Ohio. He pointed out that a manuscript was misread leading to a custom for the past several hundred years of a parent sitting shivah for a child who converted out of Judaism. Never was such a law and we should discourage such nonsense. Obviously then one does not sit shivah for a child who intermarries, and thus it is a stronger challenge to convince Jewish youth to marry within the faith. But we don't consider them "dead" when they make choices that are contrary to our tradition - we wait and behave in such a fashion as to ultimately bring them home with love, understanding and compassion.

You might want to seek out literature such as David Weiss Halivini - it's heavy in content but authoritative - which discusses how a very observant, pious and thoroughly reliably scholar understand the Written and the Oral Torah.

There are many theories and ultimately it is up to each Jew to choose what s/he will believe about the origins of the Torah and how it unfolded to what it is today.

More modern interpretations make "observance of the Torah and Torah tradition and interpretations" a challenge if they are not specifically, word for word, a divine command.

BTW where do you live - I may be able to suggest a Rabbi nearby.

Good luck

Rabbi Dov