The Calendar and the Cosmos
May 12, 2009
In a recent Boston Globe article (5/2/09), astronomer Alan MacRobert, a senior editor for Sky and Telescope magazine, commented on the manner by which people mark time according to astronomical cycles that don’t fit neatly into our human, mathematical structures.
“Three great astronomical cycles - the day, the month, and the year - have governed people’s ordering of time throughout history. The day is one rotation of the Earth. The month is one cycle of the moon. And the year is one revolution of Earth around the sun.
“Since prehistoric times, nearly every culture has considered these cycles to be a sort of cosmic clockwork built by the Creator to mark out the cycles of nature and human life. The problem is that its gears don’t mesh. Each one of the three spins along on its own, disconnected from the others. So every calendar that attempts to interrelate them, as if they were part of a single plan, becomes an ever-more-complicated mess of approximations and kludges…
“Contrary to humanity’s assumption since forever, they were not intelligently designed. They resulted from the random, natural processes of how the solar system fell together at its formation 4.6 billion years ago (and various random perturbations since then), like stars and planets everywhere. These large-scale happenstances show no more planning than swirls of dust in the wind. People have lost their faith over less.”
In reading MacRobert’s observations, I thought immediately of how our Jewish perspective actually refutes his argument and turns it on its head. In the Book of Exodus, just before the night of the Passover, God instructs the Israelites as follows regarding the reckoning of sacred times and seasons: “This month shall be for you the beginning of the months; it shall be the first of the months of the year for you.” (Exodus 12:2) The sages of our tradition, noticing the emphatic qualification “for you”, taught that the recognition of sacred times was, therefore, entirely a human enterprise.
Likewise, in the Book of Leviticus we read: “These are the festivals of the Lord which you shall proclaim…” (Leviticus 23:4) And so again, the rabbis understood that God was telling the Israelites: If you proclaim them, then they are My festivals, but if you do not proclaim them, they are not My festivals.”
In other words, Judaism asserts that sacred days and seasons, and even the very reckoning of time are NOT inherently part of the order of the Universe. The cosmos and the natural universe know nothing of our festivals, New Years, or Sabbaths. These are, indeed, purely human institutions! But rather being than a challenge to our faith, we believe that this simple reality provides us with both a great gift and the remarkable power to create and declare sanctity in time.
In fact, sacred moments come into being only through the behaviors we choose to follow. For instance, Friday night and Saturday only become Shabbat when we decide, in the parlance of our tradition, to “make Shabbat.” And therefore, when we decide to elevate time, such as Shabbat or the festivals, through the practices of our tradition, we suffuse that time with holiness that would otherwise simply never be present.
Despite MacArthur’s assertion, it makes little difference to our Jewish faith that the irregularity of the moon’s rotations about the earth, and the earth’s rotations about the sun, and even the earth’s rotation on its own axis, force us to joggle our calendar every now and then so that the seasons remain in the correct order. More important to us is the realization that all of time contains the possibility for holiness, if we simply decide to make it so.
