Rabbi Lipman's Monthly Message
Rabbi Lipman's Message
November, 2002
Chanukah on Thanksgiving Weekend?? How is such a thing possible? Well, the Jewish calendar actually involves two different calendars at the same time. Months are determined by the lunar cycle.
A lunar month is 29 ½ days. Since it is impossible to celebrate half a day, some months are counted as having 29 days and others as having 30 days. Thus, a purely lunar year would consist of 354 days, eleven days fewer than a solar year of 365 days.
This disparity of eleven days created a potential problem. Our major festivals, Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot are all agriculturally-oriented, so they are dependent upon the solar calendar. Even our minor holidays, such as Chanukah and Purim are seasonally-oriented. Over the year our holidays are a carefully orchestrated celebration of seasonal high points and dips. Rosh HaShanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot take place in the fall. Pesach celebrates the spring barley harvest. Shavuot takes place in early summer at the wheat harvest. If we maintained only a lunar calendar, our festivals would continually slip backwards eleven days each year. After six years, Sukkot would be in the summer and Pesach would appear in the winter. We would lose the seasonal exclamation points of our holidays.
In order to adjust our lunar calendar with the solar year, our sages added an extra month of 29 days on a careful schedule, seven times every nineteen years. The Jewish leap year takes place in the third, sixth, eighth, eleventh, fourteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth years of the nineteen-year cycle. This leap-year month, Adar II, was added at the end of the Hebrew year, immediately before the month of Nisan. Doing so guaranteed that the agricultural holidays remained in their proper seasons. With Chanukah so “early” this year (it’s still the 25th of the Hebrew month Kislev, after all….), it should not surprise you that this spring will include a “leap year,” the adding of a full extra month, Adar II. That will mean that Purim and Pesach will “suddenly” be late!
Because of this leap year, the Jewish holidays appear on the secular calendar at a different time each year, either "early" or "late." No one ever thinks of the holidays as being on time. It’s tradition!
Rabbi David E. Lipman
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