Jewish Time

The major ideas of the Jewish religion, even though they are intangible, are made accessible by being embedded in time. They are celebrated on specific days in a yearly cycle of feast and fast and anchored in space -- by palpable substances such as a hut or matzah or candles.

Anything that can be done at anytime by anybody will be done at no time by nobody. Judaism preserves the exalted principles and the cataclysmic events of its history through a structured, well-defined, and specifically timed system of practices that it requires of its adherents.

The religious calendar has therefore been referred to as "the catechism of the Jew."

The Days

The Jewish day does not begin and end at midnight as does the secular calendar day. Midnight is not a distinguishable astronomic event. In the era before the modern clock, a specific hour of the night could not be precisely known, whereas an hour of the day was easily determined by sighting the location of the sun. Thus, the day had to begin by precise, simple and universally recognized standards. This meant that the day had to be reckoned either from the beginning of night or the beginning of day.

In Jewish time, the day begins with the onset of night (the appearance of the stars) followed by the morning (which technically begins with the appearance of the North Star). According to some Jewish teachers, night and morning begin with sunset and sunrise respectively. For that is how the Torah describes it: "And there was evening and there was morning, the first day." That is how the Torah describes it: "And there was evening and there was morning, the first day."

For this reason, the Sabbath begins on Friday night and ends with the appearance of the stars on Saturday night. The same is true for the major holidays such as Passover, Sukkot, Shavuot, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the fast day of Tisha B'Av, and Hanukkah and Purim.

Beginning the day with the night is, in a sense, a metaphor of life itself. Life begins in the darkness of the womb, then bursts into the brightness of the light and eventually settles into the darkness of the grave, which, in turn, is followed by a new dawn in the world-to-come.

Life consists of light and dark: "And there was evening and there was morning." What we make of time is what counts.