It is considered a minor holiday and is celebrated with special prayers and a festive meal. And on this coming Sunday, March 14, , we will welcome what is perhaps the most important month in the Hebrew calendar: Nisan.
While the Jewish new year Rosh Hashanah is celebrated in the fall, the first month of the Jewish calendar Nisan actually occurs in the spring, coinciding with the annual festival of Passover. Passover, or Pesach in Hebrew, is a yearly festival that begins on the 15th of the month of Nisan and lasts for seven or eight days, depending on whether it is being celebrated in Israel or in the Diaspora.
Many Jews celebrate by eating Matzah, an unleavened flatbread made solely from flour and water, and participating in a Passover Seder, or ceremonial meal. Prior to the COVID pandemic, Passover seders were like the Superbowl for Jewish families, with huge family gatherings, amazing food and lots of laughter. But due to the ongoing pandemic, this year will mark the second Passover that must be celebrated virtually. In the midst of an enduring global health crisis and national reckoning on issues of racial injustice, I offer the following introduction to my virtual Pesach Seder this year.
May it be a meaningful celebration, where we connect in whatever ways we can, and pray for the day when we will once again be together in person. Passover, at its core, challenges us to remember a time when white Jewish people were not considered white, when they were not thought to be economically successful, when they did not have privilege. The holiday takes us back to when we were slaves in Egypt, and asks us to feel empathy towards those who face challenges in the modern world.
Those who have less than we do. Those who encounter discrimination and bigotry on a daily basis. Those who are alone. But despite this foundation of empathy, the language surrounding Passover this year, on social media and in the news , has become all about us.
How can we, once again, celebrate Passover in a meaningful way without the ability to gather? Martin Luther King Jr. The months of the Jewish year are lunar in nature. Unlike the months of the Gregorian solar year that is the norm in the world today, the months of the Jewish year reflect the phases of the moon.
This can be seen most clearly in the length of the months. Whereas the months of the Gregorian calendar vary in length between 28 and 31 days in order to make a solar year of or, in leap years, days, the months of the Jewish year are either 29 or 3o days long. This reflects the fact that a lunar month is A year of 12 lunar months, however, is some 11 days shorter than a solar year. In order to ensure that the various seasonally based holidays in the Jewish calendar continue to occur at the correct season, the rabbis developed a system over time that allowed them to coordinate their lunar months with the solar year by inserting a leap month at the end of the year seven times in every year cycle.
This is now fixed in the third, sixth, eighth, 11th, 14th, 17th, and 19th years of the cycle. Although this is traditionally ascribed to Rabbi Hillel II in the fourth century CE, it is probable that the system in use today developed slowly during the course of the mid to late first millennium.
In order to further fine-tune their calculations, the rabbis determined that the months of Nisan, Sivan, Av, Tishrei, and Shevat are always 30 days long.
Iyyar, Tammuz, Elul, Tevet and Adar are always 29 days long. Heshvan and Kislev are either 29 or 30 days in length. In a leap year, there are two months of Adar. A short Jewish year, therefore, consists of to days, while a leap year varies between and days. The names that we use for the Jewish months are actually Babylonian in origin and were adopted by the Jews as of the time of the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE. The Bible indicates that until then the months were oftentimes called simply by their numerical position in the year First Month, Second Month, etc.
In addition, the Bible does record some ancient names for the months that disappeared once the Jews adopted the Babylonian names. These include the now-forgotten months of Bul and Aviv, among others.
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