The First Month?
Sermon Shabbat Tazria-HaChodesh 5782
When does the year begin? This should be a basic, elementary question that any reasonably bright child could answer easily. We learn our months by the time we move from pre-school to kindergarten, just after we learn the days of the week. Yet even the answer to this simple question—when do we start our year?—can take on peculiar trajectories in Judaism.
“This month is the first month of the year” begins the special maftir Torah reading for Shabbat HaChodesh, the Sabbath that celebrates the beginning of the Hebrew calendar month of Nisan which falls tonight and tomorrow with Rosh Chodesh Nisan. Since the Jewish year as we know it today begins in the fall with Rosh HaShanah, this declaration in Exodus requires a bit of explanation. How can this be the first month of the year if the year doesn’t start for another six months? Isn’t that the same as declaring that July 1st is actually New Year’s Day 2023?
The answer tells us quite a bit about the way our religion evolved.
All annual calendars are based on astronomical calculation, either the visible cycles of the moon or that of the sun or, occasionally, the stars. Some calendars combine lunar and solar aspects to reach a kind of heavenly compromise. But the calendars we have today—the Gregorian one we use in America and Europe and most countries, the Jewish calendar, the Chinese calendar, the Muslim calendar and so on—are all based in one way or another on visible features in the sky and the flow of seasons that come from those cyclical variations.
Now the beginning of the calendar year is essentially an arbitrary choice, just like deciding when year “1” will be. As a society or ruler, you have to choose: do you start your year with the shortest day or the longest? Or do you choose the time when the land is sprouting new life everywhere? Or perhaps you begin the new year after harvest time, during a period of gratitude and plenty? Or do you base your New Year’s Day on some historical event or religious experience and count the days and months from there?
Throughout human history, including during the time of the events of the Hebrew Bible, most societies decided the year began in the spring. People were entirely dependent on the fertility of the land, and spring heralded the time when things began to grow: trees filled with leaves and blossoms, grain started its climb from the earth, herd animals gave birth. The ancient Sumerians, whome most historians believe to have created the very first civilization of all, celebrated their Akitu barley-sowing New Year’s festival on the first day of the first month of spring. That springtime month for them, and for their Babylonian and Assyrian successors, was called “Nisanu,” essentially identical to our own Hebrew name for this month, Nisan.
The other and actually, the older Jewish name for this month, Aviv, simply means “spring” in Hebrew. It’s no accident that our own great Chag ha’Aviv, the springtime festival of Passover, starts this month. This time of year was the obvious choice, when the earth God has given us demonstrates its incredible generative power. And so, the Torah tells us that this month is the first month of year, very much in keeping with the practices of the even more ancient civilizations of the Middle East. The first month, the rosh Chodashim, is therefore Nisan.
But what are we to make of the fact that while the Torah tells us that this is the first month, in our current Hebrew calendar it’s the 7th month of the year? How does one become seven?
There may be a practical reason for that; Judaism is, after all, pragmatic idealism, and we have adapted often in our long history to changing conditions. It may simply be that after we established ourselves in the land of Israel we became more settled and eventually less dependent on the largesse of the natural world that God had created. We focused on the established rituals of a settled people, and the collective communal experience of purging sin, error and guilt became ever more significant. Perhaps it was simply that people living in cities had so much more opportunity for sin than the rural country folk we were at first in Israel… In any case, the release from sin that typified the period of the fall High Holy Days made Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur increasingly more significant, the time of year when our soul’s journey is central.
The spring month of Nisan, and its great growth festival of freedom, still mattered, of course, and it was likely still considered to be a kind of equally important “new year.” But the new year for the monarchy was established as taking place at Rosh HaShanah, not Nisan, on the first of Tishrei. That became the date when we changed years, officially, even if Nisan remained the first month.
But when we were expelled from our land and forced to wander the earth, the first-day-of-spring holiday celebrating agricultural growth became significantly less important. The Passover message of freedom mattered most—of course, it still matters profoundly—but it was no longer considered “the new year festival.” That was now clearly Rosh HaShanah.
The rabbis of the Talmud associated other great events with the 1st of Tishrei, too—the creation of the world, culminating in the creation of the first human beings, was also assigned by attribution to the 1st of Tishrei—I mean, none of the rabbis who came up with that were actually present when Adam and Eve were brought into the world, so it has to be by attribution—which made Rosh HaShanah into “HaYom Harat Olam”, the day of the world or universe’s birth, the birthday of the world. And in the time of the Temple in Jerusalem, Rosh HaShanah was also the date when taxes were due, the 10% tithe assessed on almost all produce and most animals, making it kind of the April 15th of Biblical Judaism. Tishrei 1 also became the date for beginning sabbatical years and jubilee years, although the Torah actually commands that the Jubilee, at least, was supposed to begin on Yom Kippur, not Rosh HaShanah.
The Talmud also tells us of two other new years, by the way, one of which we still celebrate—Tu BiShvat, the new year for trees in the winter—and one of which we don’t, the first of Elul, just a month before Rosh HaShanah, when our ancestors used to pay their cattle taxes.
Much later, in the Middle Ages, yet another new year was added, even if we don’t all think about it that way: Simchat Torah, the new year for Torah, when we finish chanting the Torah with the end of Deuteronomy and start all over again with Genesis. Is that five new years each and every year? That would be a little too much, no?
So, if we haven’t confused you enough yet, let’s go back to what makes this particular new year, the ancient one of the first of Nisan, special still today. Rosh Chodesh Nisan, the first of Nisan, tonight and tomorrow, is an annual reminder of the beginning of the month of spring, which automatically had to be associated with Pesach, the springtime Chag HaAviv, the festival of spring. It is an ancestral memory of this special month of growth and new life, and it retains three vital messages for us.
The first is that we have a responsibility to be good stewards for the natural world that God has gifted us. It is up to us to preserve the planet we have been given, to prevent its destruction through thoughtless and selfish misuse. In an era of global warming, when we can see the threat to the very survival of our species on this God-granted earth as a real possibility, we have a Jewish responsibility to address this danger and to protect the natural world.
The second message is just as important. As the proverb tells us, we must count each day so that we can make each day count. Living our lives in a meaningful, even holy way requires that we work to make every day valuable and even sacred.
And the third lesson is likely the greatest one. It is this: in this season of fresh growth and budding nature, we can take hope and energy from the vibrant, vital natural world of Nisan. On this Shabbat of Aviv, of spring, we, too, can begin again in a season of fresh energy and eternal hope.
May this first month of the year, however we think about it, be a month of joy and goodness for you, for our people Israel, and for this troubled world.