Q: Dear Rabbi:  Why are the holidays never at the right time? It seems that in some years the holidays come later in the calendar, while in other years the holidays are earlier! This was especially the case with the High Holy Days this year. Why is this so?

A: We often say that the holidays are always on time, just not at the time we would like! This fluctuation in “timing” is actually due to the fact that Judaism operates on a lunar calendar which is then adjusted to the solar calendar so that our holidays and festivals occur around the “time” they should be. We do this for obvious reasons. If we did not adjust the lunar calendar to loosely correspond to the solar calendar, many of our festivals, which are tied to the agricultural calendar of the Land of Israel, would not occur at their proper season. Passover, the spring festival, would occur at seasons other than the spring as would Sukkot and Shavuot. Let me elaborate.

We know that in early times our people calculated time by observing the movement of the moon around the earth, a cycle which took 29½ days to compete. Twelve of these (lunar) months adds up to approximately 354 days in a year, clearly a shorter year than we are accustomed to with our 365 day solar year. If there were no adjustment to the lunar calendar, then our holidays, with each passing lunar year, would arrive eleven days earlier than the previous year. The implications are obvious. With the arrival of another new year, the holidays would be celebrated eleven days earlier than in the previous year, with the result that Passover, a Spring festival, would eventually be commemorated in the Winter, then in the Fall, then in the Summer.

Our rabbis, to remedy this problem, and to maintain the tradition of calculating Jewish festivals and holy days according to the pattern of the moon, had to devise a system that would take the movement of the moon around the earth (lunar) and the movement of the earth around the sun (solar) into account. This problem was solved with the introduction of a leap year which is inserted between the month of Adar and the month of Nisan, approximately every third year (which accounts for the thirty-three days lost over a period of three years). In time, under the guidance of Hillel II, the rules of the calendar were firmly established, guaranteeing that the lunar calendar of Judaism with its 354 days in a year corresponded to the solar calendar of 365 days per year. Hillel II determined that there would be seven leap years every nineteen years. He further concluded that in this nineteen year cycle, the leap years would occur in the third, sixth, eighth, eleventh, fourteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth years. Combining the lunar and solar calendars in this way enabled our people to observe the holidays in their appropriate seasons.

The upcoming holiday of Chanukah always begins on the 25th day of the Hebrew month of Kislev. When we light our first candle on December 4th, we will be tempted to say that the holiday is early this year. Because of what we now understand about the calendar, we know why this appears to be the case. The holidays may never seem to come at the right time for us, but they do come at the right time!

 

Rabbi Sam Weinstein