Calendar
Tzav
Purim always occurs when winter is ending and we have time to give a kick to that Haman we call cold weather. Within a month the days warm up, buds appear, Spring begins and we celebrate Pesach.
At the darkest time of the year, when all hope seems lost, we celebrate Chanukah, and during the hottest time of the year when the days are long and there seems to be no surcease from the humidity, we observe the Fast of Av commemorating the destruction of both Temples.
And a little before the commencement of summer, we celebrate the last of our harvest holidays, Shavuot. It is then that we are supposed to have meals replete with vegetables and fruit of every kind. It is then that we recognize the full glory of the world.
Our New Year, Rosh Hashanah, begins with autumn when the leaves fall off the trees, and we recognize life does not go on forever. It is then that we find time to ask God for forgiveness for the foolish acts and indiscretions that we committed since last autumn.
The Jewish calendar is a living calendar created by a people who did not know the astronomy of sun and earth; who did not have opportunity to figure out and record how the calendar works. That was for another and a later age. Our people did see the changing seasons, and they understood their history according to those changes. They knew what the year would bring by the holidays that they were observing.
We have lost that facility. Most of us rely on calendars to tell us where we are in the year. We have separated ourselves from nature more and more as we have mechanized the world and made it more a reflection of whom we are.
With all of their primitive ways, the generations that came long before us understood time better than we do today. Where we rely on the clock and the calendar, they relied upon the sun and the moon.
Previous Parshat
|
|
||
|
Rabbi Aaron Kriegel |
Cantor Marsha Schreier |
President Marc Wurgaft |
|
© 2004 Congregation Beth Ahm of West Essex |
||