High Holidays are late/early this year

Every year, people say the High Holidays are either early or late. It is always hard to remember when the Jewish Holydays take place because they occur on different days every year. The reason they jump around is that the Jewish calendar is lunar rather than solar. This means that instead of basing the year on the sun, we use the moon.

Each phase of the moon is a little longer than 29 days. 12 months of twenty-nine and a half days would be several days shorter than our solar year of 365 1/4 days. If nothing were done, our holidays would occur earlier and earlier in relation to the solar year.

This is the case with the Islamic calendar. Their year begins eleven days earlier on the solar calendar than the previous year. Our ancestors were farmers and needed a calendar that conformed to the agricultural cycles.

The extra month is added to the year so that Passover does not occur before the Spring Equinox. A leap month is added seven years of a nineteen-year cycle. This year, 5760, is one in which a month is added.

The month added is a second month of Adar, the month before Passover. Thus, the Jewish Holidays for the year 2000 will seem late. Then, the following year, they will occur about ten days earlier.

Does this seem crazy? Well, an adjustment was made to the secular calendar to make 12 months (really moonths) equal a solar year. The months of the Gregorian calendar do not correspond to a lunar cycle of 29 1/2 days. The months are either 31, 30, 28 or 27 days.

The Islamic calendar ignores the solar cycle; the Gregorian calendar ignores the lunar cycles. Our calendar uses both the solar and lunar year. How Jewish! Instead of rejecting one reality (the sun) or the other (the moon), we try to harmonize two independent phenomena. The earth’s revolution around the sun (365 1/4) days, and the moon’s to revolution around the earth (29 1/2 days) are unrelated to each other. It is only from our perspective on earth that they seem to be related.

This is the Jewish way. We do not ignore the conflicting elements of the world, but try to bring harmony to them. We do so by doing Mitzvote. A mitzvah is a way of tying heaven and earth together. It is through mitzvote that we make a secular moment sacred.

Even through our calendar, we try to bring harmony to the world. It is for this purpose, making G-ds presence felt in a seemingly fractured universe, that we were chosen.