Rosh Hashana rushes the summer season

Randi Kreiss

It just doesn’t feel like a New Year, even a Jewish New Year. Not when the beach chairs still sit on the sand and heat waves shimmer over the community. Everyone knows the Jewish holidays are never on time. They’re either too early or too late or in the middle of the week, starting at sundown on a workday.

This places an inordinate burden on women who often begin to wobble under the staggering responsibilities of family and food shopping, cooking and baking and jobs. This year is a doozy. Rosh Hashana, which marks the New Year, began at sundown on Wednesday, just two days after Labor Day. School starts, and then it stops.

Of course, this is because the Jewish calendar and the civil calendar have little in common besides keeping track of time. The Jewish calendar is based on three astronomical phenomena: the rotation of the Earth about its axis (a day); the revolution of the moon about the Earth (a month); and the revolution of the Earth about the sun (a year). These three phenomena are independent of one another, so there is no direct correlation between them.

The civil calendar used by most of the world has arbitrarily set the length of months at 28, 30 or 31 days. Very logical, but Judaism is a very ancient religion; if you’ve been counting the days one way for 5,771 years, change comes slowly. Besides, faith and logic often collide.

In the Jewish calendar, months are either 29 or 30 days; years are either 12 or 13 months. If you follow the planets and stars, it all makes perfect sense, and the holidays always fall at exactly the right time every year.

But what has this to do with the price of kishke or preparing noodle pudding for 35? Just that summer is still a presence and the cicadas still sing us to sleep, even as we’re being pushed by the Jewish calendar to mark the New Year.

But inconvenient timing is the least of it for a long-suffering people.