This past Shabbat, our weekly Torah reading landed us in the penultimate parashah (portion) of the book of Vayikra (Leviticus) where we encounter a priestly articulation of the rhythms of the Jewish year: each biblical Jewish holiday—from Passover, to Shavuot, to the High Holidays and Sukkot—is spelled out, along with its associated rituals and tabernacle offerings—from the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, to the booths on Sukkot, and so forth.
As a prelude to this systematic rendition of the calendar, a seemingly innocuous verse introduces the holidays (but oh, verses in the Torah are never as simply understood as they appear, are they): “These are the set times of Adonai, the sacred occasions, which you shall proclaim each at its appointed time,” reads Leviticus 23:4 before listing the holidays.
But as is so often the case in sacred text a seemingly mundane missive conceals a mountain of Torah underneath.
For context about this mountain of Torah, one has to understand how the Jewish calendar operated in ancient times. The Jewish calendar is lunisolar; each month is determined by one revolution of the moon around the earth. It takes approximately 29 and one-half days for the moon to revolve around the earth, which means that some Jewish months are 29 days and some 30. In ancient times, the Jewish community determined whether a month was 29 or 30 days by reliance on witnesses: as I understand it, witnesses would go out and look at the sky as the 30th day approached. If no sliver of a new moon appeared, that meant the preceding/exiting month would be the full 30 days; if a sliver of a moon did appear the exiting month was a mere 29 days and it was time to celebrate the new month. This was formalized through testimony in front of the sanhedrin (Jewish high court), who determined whether the witnesses’ testimony was valid or not, and made a determination effective for the whole community. (This explains the Diasporic tradition where we celebrate each holiday over two days—two Passover seders for example—to ensure far-flung communities who would not hear the results of the determination in time celebrated on each of the two possible days.)
The challenge is that witnesses’ testimony was often disputed; the appearance of the smallest sliver of the moon was a fickle thing, apparently, and some rabbis were occasionally convinced that the head rabbi’s determination was wrong, and thus that Jews were celebrating holidays on the wrong days. The stakes for such a determination were immense.
Rabbi Akiva resolved this challenge by relying on our verse from Leviticus. “These are the appointed seasons of the Lord, sacred convocations, which you shall proclaim in their season” (Lev 23:4) (emphasis added). “This verse indicates,” he taught “that whether you have proclaimed them at their proper time or whether you have declared them not at their proper time, I [God] have only these Festivals as established by the representatives of the Jewish people” (Babylonian Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 24b). In other words, we understand Rabbi Akiva to be saying, regardless of whether the underlying astronomical determination is correct, once the Jewish people, through their representative collective governing body, has made a determination, that determination becomes the sacred day. The underlying evidence doesn’t matter anymore. This may seem arbitrary but it is anything but: it underscores our collective understanding of the need for sacred cohesion. It is more important that we all celebrate the holiday together than that we celebrate it on the (formerly) “correct” day.
Further, and perhaps more beautifully, God seems to be the one empowering us to do this. God, according to this rabbinic understanding, is not saying, “you better get My Truth right.” God, in this case, is saying, “I empower you, the people, to recognize the sacredness in rallying around a collective day of celebration, and through your collective determination, that becomes the sacred day.”
It is, I believe, a profound message on the importance of sacred community and on the salience of the Divine-human partnership in Jewish theology.
