On the Times Commonly Presented for Birkat HaL’vana, Part 3

By Avi Grossman

Some time ago, my first article appeared on the Seforim Blog (link). It felt good to join the club.

In the comments section, readers took much more issue with the opinion of Rabbi Bar Hayim that I mentioned at the outset than they did with any of the arguments I myself was advancing, and it it even got a little personal, but along the way, I was able to refine some points I had always wanted to make, and I discovered some potential answers to other lingering questions.

The Talmud relates (Sanhedrin 42a):

“R. Aha b. Hanina also said in the name of R. Assi in Rabbi Yohanan’s name: Whoever pronounces the blessing over the new moon (hahodesh) in its due time (bizmano) welcomes, as it were, the presence of the Shechinah: for one passage states, “This month will be your first month,” while elsewhere it is said, “This is my God, and I will glorify Him.””

Rabbi Bar Hayim had argued that “in its due time” was a reference to Rosh Hodesh. I called this an elegant proof, and others challenged the assertion of elegance, saying it was no proof at all. I countered that if one were to look elsewhere in the Talmud, specifically in the second chapter of Rosh Hashana and Maimonides’s laws of Sanctifying the New Moon, the expression the “new moon in its due time” always meant the night when the court was expecting witnesses to spot the new moon, i.e. the first night of the month. For some inexplicable reason, this was still not accepted, with the other side arguing that somehow, this passage in Sanhedrin was referring to something else, possibly the allowed, as opposed to prescribed, time for reciting the blessing,^[1] which was the first half of the month. I showed that that was untenable based on the language, and also redundant, because if it were not the first half of the month, the blessing could not be recited at all, and therefore Rabbi Yohanan should just have said “he who recites the blessing on the moon.”

I also pointed out that Rabbi Yohanan’s proofs from the verses are also unequivocal. What is the connection between the verses he cites? Both have the word zeh, “this,” denoting that in the former verse, the one used as the source for all of our sages’ teachings concerning finding and sanctifying the new moon, God, so to speak, pointed out the appearance of the new moon to Moses and Aaron, while in the latter verse the people perceived God so clearly, it was as if they were pointing at Him. It is clear that Rabbi Yohanan can only be referring to spotting the new moon, and nothing else.

Some then pointed out that the offending word, bizmano, was not in some manuscripts of the Talmud, making any proof based thereon moot, but once again, the opposite would be true: If Rabbi Yohanan was specifically referring to the blessing on the hodesh, then it by force must be the first night of the month because thereafter the moon is not referred to as hodesh, “NEW moon,” but rather as just yareiah or l’vana!

Parenthetically, this, and the follow-up comments to my second post, made me realize that when trying to analyze the Talmud and codes, it is important to practice a form of  talmudic constitutional-originalism, in this case approaching the source texts with an intention to understand them as their writers meant them. In this case, I was advocating for an originalist approach to understanding what bizmano meant, and really, one should try to compare the sources with contemporaneous sources in order to be sure what the terms mean. My disputants were certainly not taking an originalist approach, and you can read their various arguments.^[2]

However, and this is something that carries a significance I have only begun to realize, although intellectual honesty requires of us to be originalists when dealing with those facets of the Oral Law that have been committed to writing, when the sages themselves looked to the scriptures, they practiced originalism when trying to give over the p’shat, the plain meaning, but they also practiced a form of “living-and-breathing constitutionalism” (or whatever is the opposite of talmudic originalism) when they derived teachings using the methods of exposition, or as we would say in Yeshivish, “when they made drashos based on the middos shehatorah nidreshses bahem.” The sages engaged in active reinterpretation of verses, and in a functioning Sanhedrin, such new teachings were halachically binding for all of Israel. If you think about it, the Written Torah with its critical oral counterpart was meant to be interpreted as a living and breathing document, and this harks back to a point I made a few years ago.

I then pointed out something which has even more halachic consequences. The aforementioned passage from Sanhedrin continues:

“In the school of Rabbi Ishmael it was taught: Had Israel earned no other privilege than to greet the presence of their Heavenly Father once a month, it would be sufficient. Abaye said: Therefore, we must recite it standing.”

That is, according to this exact reading of the Talmud, one only succeeds in greeting the Divine Presence if he recites birkat hal’vana the night of Rosh Hodesh, and therefore one needs to stand for the blessing only if he recites the blessing the night of Rosh Hodesh! If you take another look at Maimonides’s formulation, you can see that is implied, because he first mentions the issue of standing, citing our version of the Talmud, and then mentions that after the fact, one can still recite the blessing after Rosh Hodesh.

Most importantly, the points I was making, namely that Rabbi Yohanan in Sanhedrin is discussing birkat hal’vana specifically on Rosh Hodesh, and that the implication is that one should stand for reciting the blessing only on Rosh Hodesh, can be found by reading Rabbeinu Manoah’s commentary on Maimonides, and that he goes even farther. Many of the blog’s commentators were arguing that what I was writing was entirely my own, but they should have looked at the sources!

The Hebrew version of the Schottenstein edition mentions that the classic commentators do not explain why the word bizmano is there, and that the expression has a seeming redundancy that of course one has to recite the blessing when it is the blessing’s time, but they do not try to find out what the term means elsewhere, and they mention that an alternative manuscript does not have that word, but they fail to make anything of it. Dealing with Rabbeinu Yona on B’rachot, there were always some lingering difficulties I had with his essay, as I wrote here:

Rabbeinu Yona’s comments at the end of the fourth chapter of B’rachoth describe three ways to understand what Massecheth Sof’rim meant by not reciting the blessing “ad shetithbasseim…” Rabbeinu Yona offers his own understanding, and this is the basis for all later misunderstandings: tithbasseim refers to the light of the moon being significantly “sweet,” a state that it only achieves “two to (or ‘or’) three days” into the new lunar cycle. Why the vague language? Because no two months are the same. By the time the moon becomes visible for the first time, it could be that the molad itself was anywhere from twelve hours to 48 hours to even more or even less before that, and each month has its own set of astronomical conditions that affect this. See this chart. Notice that no two months share a percent illumination, or location in the sky, and each has its own level of difficulty being spotted. When two days are shown consecutively, it is because the first day’s conditions were not sufficient for most to have actually enjoyed or even seen the light of the moon. The possibilities are endless, and there is no objective rule for determining how much time the moon takes each month to get to the stage Rabbeinu Yona describes, and that is why he used the vague terminology “two to three days.” (As pointed out on the last page of the linked file, Maimonides did feel that there was a mathematical formula for determining minimal visibility.) More importantly, the “two to three days” statement is just an example of how long it takes, but the underlying rule is when the light becomes “sweet…” In languages like 13th-century Rabbinic Hebrew and Modern Hebrew and English, “two to three days” or “two or three days” allow for all of those possibilities. The halacha also allows for that… it seems that in every subsequent work you can find (with the the very important and critical exception of the Beth Yosef), the opinion of Rabbeinu Yona’s mentor is referred to as “Rabbeinu Yona’s opinion,” even though he offered one that actually differed from that of his mentor, and it is inaccurately reported as waiting for three days after the molad, taking out the the critical “two or/to.” Even later, it is further transformed into waiting until after three days have passed, i.e., at least 72 hours. This evolution is clear from reading the sources as they appear in the halachic record in chronological order. This is unfortunate and also illogical, because we saw above that the whole idea of “two to three days” is only offered as a way to describe how long it may take the light of the moon to become “sweet.” It could actually vary, because the sweetness is the point. Rabbeinu Yona did not mean “three days, in every single situation, no matter what,” and even if he had said that the underlying rule is to wait three days from the beginning of the cycle, why did they add that “at least” modifier?

The readers of the Seforim Blog rightfully asked: how could it be that Rabbeinu Yona did not read what was obvious to others, that the starting point for the recitation of the blessing was Rosh Hodesh? Perhaps it was not obvious!? To this I offered that perhaps he had incomplete access to the sources. After all, he himself admits that he was unfamiliar with our text of Massechet Soferim, which explicitly mentions birkat hal’vana on Saturday night. It is not such a stretch to say that his text of Sanhedrin was deficient, or that he did not have the complete version of TY B’rachot.

They also failed to notice that Rabbeinu Yona’s explicit hava amina, assumption, was that birkat hal’vana should be recited on Rosh Hodesh, but  Massechet Soferim could be used to derive when the blessing should first be recited because his text of Sanhedrin apparently could not. That is, just like he did not recognize our text of Soferim, he apparently did not have our text of Sanhedrin.

In their commentaries to Maimonides’s ruling that birkat hal’vana should be recited on Rosh Hodesh, two other 13th century sages, Rabbeinu Manoah and the Hagahot Maimoniyot, aka Rabbi Meir Hakohen, a student of the Maharam of Rothenburg, are explicit that the Talmudic sources indicate what Maimonides says, and they go further. Rabbeinu Manoah explains why the decisors did not take Massechet Soferim into halachic account on this issue:

“Because it does not make sense for one to delay performing a commandment that he has an opportunity to perform. Who knows how the world runs and what may occur, and there is much that can come upon someone that can prevent him from eventually performing [the commandment]. Therefore, any one who fears God should bless [the moon] right when he sees it in its renewal, and not wait for Saturday night.”

Note that Rabbeinu Manoah also refers to the recitation of the blessing as “a commandment.”

The Hagahot Maimoniyot also described how the Maharam dealt with the apparent contradiction posed by following Massechet Soferim:

“And thus my master, Rabbeinu, may he live long, practices: when he takes the initiative to recite the blessing during the week so that he not miss the time for reciting the blessing – which is until the sixteenth of the month – he wears his fine suit.”

That is, the Maharam realized, as I wrote earlier, that our received text of Massechet Soferim describes how to recite the blessing, and not when. Thus, he satisfied the opinion of Massechet Soferim not by reciting the blessing on Saturday night, but by reciting it some other time while dressed nicely.

I also wondered why Rabbeinu Yona postulated that the blessing on seeing the new moon involved deriving pleasure (or benefit, depending on how you translate the word hana’a) from the light of the moon. Since when did that have to do with the other birkot har’iyah, the blessings recited upon seeing certain phenomena? Is one required to somehow benefit from seeing the sun, or the sea, or lightning in order to recite the relevant blessings? Now, the blessing on the blossoming of the fruit trees makes mention of how people receive pleasure from seeing them, but then why can’t that be the case with the moon, that one enjoys seeing it, but does not have to have enough light to have some utility.

I believe the answer is that Rabbeinu Yona took his cue from a similar blessing that is also connected to Saturday night, the only one that the sages said demands that one derive some sort of pleasure/benefit from that which he sees: the blessing on the fire, in the eighth chapter of the Brachot.

Most importantly, I also found an amazing explanation as to why Rabbeinu Yona’s interpretation of Massechet Soferim became the basis for a halachic practice and opinion that persisted in Northeast Europe, even though it was rejected by scholars who lived in more temperate lands.

Check out a link to this site, which has some pretty good diagrams indicating where and when the new moon was or will be visible. I have been looking at the site regularly for some years, but this afternoon I found something very interesting. During the summer of 1990, there were months in which the moon was positioned very far to the south of the sky. On August 21, 1990, which was Rosh Hodesh, 30 Av 5750, the new moon was visible in most of Africa and South America as the night began, but in Israel and Europe and most of North America, the moon was not visible until late the following afternoon (Fig. 1).

(Fig. 1)

Almost a month later, on September 19, 1990, Erev Rosh Hashana, the new moon was visible in the South Pacific (Fig. 2) and the next day, September 20, 1990, Rosh Hashana 5751, it was visible across Australia, Africa, and South America (Fig. 3), but once again, those In Israel, Europe, and most of North America did not see it until September 21 (Fig. 4), and this is remarkable because Australia is well to Israel’s east, and it seems reasonable that if the Australians could see the new moon, then the Israelis should have had an even easier time spotting it, being that for them the moon is almost half a day older, and therefore larger.

(Fig. 2)

(Fig. 3)

(Fig. 4)

On December 5, 2002, 30 Kislev 5763, the new moon was at least visible in Israel, but once again, it was not visible in Northeast Europe, in places where the Ashkenazic aharonim had lived (Fig. 5). The true molad, the lunar conjunction, had been the previous day, December 4, at 9:34 am Jerusalem time while the average molad was  at 9:06 pm and 13 parts, although as can be seen from here, it is actually not easy to translate the average molad times to our current UTC system. See more below about that.) The following February, the moon was much harder to see in classical Lita than it was in the Mediterranean basin (Fig. 6).

(Fig. 5)

(Fig. 6)

I found all of these examples by a very superficial perusal of their archives, and it turns out there are dozens of examples that can be easily found in the last 30 years. A general rule can be derived: the farther a place is from the equator, the harder it will be there to spot the new moon compared to places of similar longitude but closer to the equator. For those in the Northern Hemisphere, there are many months when the added difficulty is quite significant.

Looking back, I could have extrapolated this from other information I already had, including the fact that the Israeli New Moon Society always publicizes that it is easier to spot the new moon from the Negev simply because it is in the south of the country.

All of this helps explain why we find that various forms of the practice of delaying birkat hal’vana for a day or two after what would appear to be the ideal time according to the classical opinions in the Talmudim is mostly a later Ashkenazic phenomenon, and one that Litvishe Rabbis, like Rabbi Tukachinsky, brought to Israel, whereas the generally Sephardic streams advocated for birkat hal’vana on Rosh Hodesh, or a week later, as per the kabbalistic practice. The fact that in Northeast Europe, the moon was often not visible until a day or two later than when it became visible in the more temperate regions seems to be a good explanation for this feature of the literature. Often, the Jews in Northeast Europe really had to wait for the moon to become barely visible even after the molad calculations indicated it was already well-visible in the places where the sages of the Talmud and the Rishonim used to live. I am grateful to have found this very real justification for a practice that at first seemed to go against the plain meaning of the Talmud.

Ultimately, I should have known that Maimonides was aware of all this, and took this into account. Chapters 11-17 of Kiddush Hahodesh are dedicated to explaining how to find the new moon in the sky, and that is the ultimate reason for knowing when the molad is of each individual month, and not so that one can add 72 or 168 hours to it in order to know when to recite the blessing, while the the eighteenth and last chapter discusses the practical case of the moon not being spotted for a number of months due to extenuating circumstances such as weather, and in our days, pollution. Towards the end of that chapter, he mentions that the more one stands to the east, the less likely he is to spot the new moon, while the farther to the west, the more likely, and then concludes with:

“All the above statements apply to the countries west and east [of Israel ] at the same latitude, i.e., they are between 30 and 35 degrees north [of the equator]. If they are located farther to the northerly, or less to the norther, different principles apply, for they are not parallel to Eretz Yisrael.”

There is no reason, therefore, to consider that places in northern Europe should be able to spot the new moon according to the molad in Israel, and as we have seen, they often have to wait significantly longer to see the moon.

…

Getting back to the issue of calculations and Professor Bromberg’s thesis, I recently saw that this year, the Ittim L’vina calendar has a new appendix explaining how there is a major disagreement regarding how to present the classic, average molad times in our modern terms. Considering that there are 1080 parts per hour instead of 3600 seconds, it should be easy to translate any molad time to any time on our clocks, but the problem is that no one knows, for example, if the tradition says that the molad for a given month is exactly at 15 hours of the day (9am), when that is according to the UTC time (adjusted for the Jerusalem time zone)! As Maimonides writes, the clock we use to determine the average moladot is, unlock the ritual clock used everyday, a constant, 24-hour clock, that assumes the day starts at hour 0, always 24 objective hours after the start of the previous day (like the secular system defines the start of the day as exactly 24 hours after the start of the previous) and therefore, during the summer, the “molad day” starts hours before the sundown, while during the winter, the “molad day” starts sometime well after the sundown that started that halachic, calendar day. The Ittim L’vina calendar brings four attempts to figure out how to determine when the average molad for any given month actually happens, and as Prof. Bromberg has shown, the truth is that no one knows. This can not be over-emphasized. When the calendar writers say, therefore, that on a given Saturday night, laymen should refrain from reciting birkat hal’vana at 7pm, as they depart the synagogue, because the average molad was say, at 8pm three or seven days earlier, and therefore they still have another hour before “the first opportunity” (sic) to recite the blessing, it is disingenuous, because they do not really know when the average molad was! It must be stated that, when Maimonides described the times of the average moladot, the only practical application was not birkat hal’vana, because up until the 13th century, no one even imagined that the time for birkat hal’vana should depend on the molad, but rather calculating the day of the week on which to establish the first day of Tishrei, which did not necessitate knowing when exactly the molad occurred according to which ever time piece they may have used. For example, if the calculation showed that on Monday the average molad was shortly before the end of the 18th hour (noon), making Monday fit for Rosh Hashana, it only meant that in the theoretical, 24-hour clock that started with the first molad, the molad of Tishrei was before the end of the 18th hour, but no one could know if that translated to before halachic noon on that particular Monday. And no one cared, either.

This revelation thus renders most of the foregoing discussions on the matter practically moot, and gives another very good reason why, if one were wondering when to recite the blessing on seeing the new moon, he should just follow the basic understanding of the talmudim and rishonim: when he sees the new moon, he should recite the blessing.

I would like to thank Rabbi David Avihail, Rosh Yeshivat Ramot, for his constant encouragement and support in producing these articles.

^[1] For more on this critical distinction between the prescribed time and the allowed time, see, for example, Maimonides’s descriptions of the times for the daily prayers in his Laws of Prayer, 3:1-7.

^[2] My blog, avrahambenyehuda.wordpress.com, has many more articles about understanding the original biblical and talmudic terms in context.