Hopefully this week’s missive will be shorter than last week’s! I had so much to do last Wednesday but I ended up blowing it all off to write a six-hour-long blog post. Oh well.
This past week, my partner and I have been working on a Hebrew calendar for the year ahead – the Hebrew year, 5782, which begins in September 2021 of the secular calendar. I became inspired to make a Hebrew calendar last year because, while searching for my first-ever Hebrew calendar, I couldn’t find any that actually centred the Hebrew months as opposed to the secular months. This annoyed me so profoundly – the pigeonholing of important Jewish holidays within the structure of a secular-Christian lunisolar calendar instead of signposting the secular months within a coherent lunar Hebrew calendar – that I decided to simply make my own calendar, where Erev Rosh Hashanah occurs on 1 Tishri, rather than on the evening of 6 September.
For me, the act of making this calendar has been profoundly deassimilationist. Basic things, like starting days at sunset instead of midnight, have up-ended my assumed model of time – we’re now trying to figure out how to gracefully signpost normal, secular days within a Hebrew calendar which counts new days from sunset, putting the onus on the secular-Christian calendar to conform rather than modifying our conception of time to fit with the dominant lunisolar calendar.
All this raises, for me, the question of timekeeping – what inherent values are reflected in how we mark the passage of time? Calendars have changed throughout history. The Egyptians, for example, divided each month into three decans of ten days each, which functioned much as the modern 7-day week does. The Hebrew calendar itself used to simply refer to months by their order in the year, rather than by their Babylonian names as today. And two different Christian calendars – Julian and Gregorian – arose based on different ways of calculating the year that Jesus was born, both of which are probably wrong.
Most people commit to the secular calendar without thinking. Of course the year is 2021, whether or not you actually believe that the Messiah was born 2,021 years ago. Even in the Arabic world, which keeps time based on the year that Mohammed migrated from Mecca to Medina, or in China, whose many lunisolar calendars pre-date the Julian calendar, the ‘standard’ Gregorian calendar is used for civil matters. It is, put simply, temporal colonialism.
This realisation has perhaps affected my goyische partner more than me, as he’s never had a compelling reason to differ from the secular-Christian calendar, never been forced to consider the ways in which the sacred days of Christianity are privileged within it in a way that the holidays of other faiths are not. (Spare a thought here for your Muslim friends, who for the past few years in the Northern hemisphere have had to observe Ramadan during the summer! Who needs intercalary days anyway.)
I find that my perception of time changes around the first of the Shalosh Regalim, Pesach (or Passover in goy-speak). Of course, observing Shabbat every week accustoms Jews to participating in sacred time, aligning ourselves with the actions and intentions of Creator. But the other holidays in our calendar also compel us to step into sacred time as it unfolded historically, when our ancestors interacted with Creator, whether your belief in such interaction is Orthodox or not.
Pesach is particularly important to me as a holiday, because it represents the foundational event which established Jews as a coherent people, rather than a collection of Semitic desert nomads. This is also fresh on my mind because the past few Torah portions have covered the events of Exodus. In fact, some traditions – notably the Egyptian Jewish tradition – celebrate a second Rosh HaShanah on 1 Nisan, to commemorate the month in which Creator brought the Jews out of Egypt.
All of this is to say that methods of timekeeping are a choice, based on what is both practical and valuable to a culture. It is impractical to begin a calendar at the literal creation of the Universe, because humans only came to inhabit that Universe at the tail end of its current manifestation. So how we count, and where from, becomes as important as the date itself.
How long have we been here, keeping sacred time? Christians count from the birth of Christ. Muslims count from the journey of Mohammed. Romans counted from the foundation of Rome, and nicked their calendar from the Greeks, who weren’t particularly interested in marking a linear procession of time from any foundational event. The Jews, whose calendar got nicked from Babylon, counted from the supposed beginning of the world, based on the timings given in the Torah.
We’ve definitely been here longer than 5,781 years, but if that time isn’t counted, does it count?
Anyways, this post is too long now, and I’ll update the Zines section with a link once the calendar’s ready to preorder.
Sonya Blanck writings 