Calendar
Our Rabbi's Message
August 10th 2007
By Rabbi Aaron KriegelIn the Torah portion we read this week we learn about the holidays in the way that they were originally celebrated-as festivals of harvest. Some believe that our festivals were born in Egypt where Egyptians celebrated the harvest as cyclical events that happened year after year. In a sense, before there were calendars and almanacs the harvest festivals were time markers. People were able to say something about the future by what was growing in the fields.
They knew about the harvest in Spring and in Summer and in Autumn, and they knew in what order the harvests would come. In a sense the people did not need more than that. Life was not very specific and just a general time of the season was all that was necessary for them. They needed to know that harvests happened three times a year, and with that knowledge they knew that they would not go hungry.
The story of Joseph just emphasizes that point. The famine that was in the land was recognized because harvests did not produce what they had to produce. When the years went off their cycles the people became afraid. Only through the wisdom of Joseph who made a plan to free the supply of food from the season did the people of Egypt survive.
Well during the time of Moses the people made another big change to those harvest holidays. They gave them historical import. The first harvest was about the Exodus from Egypt. The second was about the giving of the Ten Commandments. The third was about the wandering in the desert. Our change was so complete that in exile our holidays are remembered for history and not harvest.
The world, as a result of our calendar changes evidenced in the harvest holidays, had a cosmic change. Years were no longer looked upon as cyclical events. People did not live and do things just as their fathers did. For the first time the cyclical year was turned into an historical year. We taught the world that as events changed the world changed. Out of this new historical understanding the idea of the end of days, the Messiah and finally progress itself developed.
But we never forgot those harvest holidays and we never completely forgot the cyclical nature of the world. We recall those earliest meanings in the Torah portion that we read today.
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