This year is highly unusual in Jewish history. It marks a very early occurrence of Chanukah in the solar calendar, so that the first day coincides with Thanksgiving, Nov. 28.
(Remember that the Jewish day always begins at sunset, not sunrise. An evening Thanksgiving dinner this year will occur at the beginning of Chanukah’s second day.)
This has never happened before — though there were two years, 1888 and 1899, when Thanksgiving occurred on the last, rather than the fourth, Thursday of the month, that Thanksgiving fell during Chanukah. Under the present American law, that cannot happen again for some 70,000 years.
There is, of course, no Jewish significance to the first day of Chanukah falling on the American holiday of Thanksgiving, any more than to Chanukah sometimes being entangled with another non-Jewish holiday on Dec. 25.
However, the uniqueness of the event raises the question of why the Jewish holidays bounce around the solar year. Chanukah, after all, begins on 25 Kislev every year in the Jewish calendar. Why is it different with the solar calendar?
We begin with the written Torah. In Genesis 1:14, we read: “And G-d said, Let there be luminaries in the firmament of the heavens to distinguish between the day and the night; and they will be for signs and seasons and for days and years.”
These “luminaries”are further described as “the great luminary” which rules the daytime (i.e., the sun), and the “small luminary” which rules the night (i.e., the moon). Thus, we learn that since the very beginning both the sun and the moon have calendric significance.
The Earth makes a complete circuit of the sun in approximately 365¼ days, which is therefore the length of a solar year. The moon’s orbit about the Earth takes roughly 29½ days. The closest approximation between the two is reached by 12 x 29.5 = 354 days.
So, the Jewish calendar consists of 12 months of 29 or 30 days each (to deal with that pesky half-day). The most common Hebrew word for month, hodesh (literally, “newness”), derives from the fact that each month begins with the “new” moon, when the merest sliver of a crescent appears in the sky, and ends when it disappears, only to re-appear again.
But this leaves us 11 days short of the solar year, and the solar year is important for two reasons: Not only does Genesis 1:14 tell us that sun is, like the moon, intended to aid in counting “seasons” and “years,”but twice, in Exodus 23:15 and 34:18, the Torah instructs us that Passover occurs in the hodesh ha’aviv, the “month of spring.”
Since Passover must fall in the spring, and Sukkot must fall at the harvest time, the lunar calendar must be kept synchronized with the solar calendar.
We do this by inserting, every two or three years, an extra month of 30 days, to compensate for how Nisan, the month in which Passover falls, drops back 11 days earlier each year (so that in three years it will be 33 days out of “synch”).
Such a 13-month year is known in Hebrew as a shana me‘ubbeeth, or “pregnant year.”By adding an extra month of Adar periodically, then, we keep the lunar calendar “in synch” with the solar calendar — almost.
Originally, the onset of the Jewish months and the intercalation of the extra month were done by observation. Witnesses would appear before the Sanhedrin to testify about the appearance of the new moon, and the rabbis would compare the months with the weather conditions and the condition of the crops in the fields to decide if it was time to add a month or not.
All this ended in the fourth century C.E., when the Romans abolished the Sanhedrin, and Hillel II Nesi’a instituted the present calendar, based on a 19-year cycle fixed by calculation.
Why 19 years? As it turns out, 235 lunar months is approximately equivalent to 19 solar years. We add an extra month in seven out of every 19 years, and it mostly works out.
But there is that word “approximately.” Those 235 lunar months actually add up to 6,939 days, 16 hours, and 595 halaqim (a Jewish hour is divided into 1,080 halaqimor “parts”), or about 33 minutes.
The 19 solar years contain roughly 6,939 days, 14 hours, and 626 halaqim, for a difference of just under two hours every 19 years.
Hence, the Jewish holidays shift approximately two hours later with each 19-year cycle, adding up to a full day every 231 years. It is to compensate for that drift that we have the unusually early onset of the holidays in 5774.
And now you know why it will be appropriate to eat latkes or sufganiyot (Israeli jelly doughnuts)with the turkey this year.
Rabbi Avner Zarmi of Shorewood is vice president of the Midwest region of Agudath Israel of America.
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