Naturally, the rabbis of the Talmud had their work cut out for them explaining this holiday. Along the way, they spend a great deal of time describing other Jewish new years (there are many!) and exploring the workings of the calendar, in particular weighing the consequences of choosing a calendar that is fixed ahead of time versus a calendar that is decided month by month according to witness testimony about the new moon. This short tractate also includes laws of the shofar and concludes with some observations on Jewish prayer. There are four chapters in total.

Chapter 1

This chapter opens with a mishnah that states there are in fact four new years. Ancient Israel had several different annual cycles, many of them tied to agriculture and tithes (agricultural taxes) that began at different seasons. The titular new year, Rosh Hashanah, takes place on the first of Tishrei and is the most prominent, identified as the new year for years (that is, the overall calendar) as well as for sabbatical and jubilee and several kinds of tithes. The other recognizable new year in this mishnah is the 15th of Shevat which is the new year for trees — a.k.a. Tu Bishvat. The first of Nisan is the new year for festivals, making Passover the first festival on the calendar.

The discussion of new years leads into a more general discussion of the calendar, which is identified as a lunar-solar calendar, with 12 or 13 lunar months. Each new month was determined by testimony, given at the Sanhedrin (high court) in Jerusalem, that a new moon had been seen. This system had numerous associated challenges, however. For one, it meant that the dates of festivals could not be known far in advance, since one never knew if a month was 29 or 30 days long. It also meant that informing outlying communities of the calendar was complicated — made more so by other groups that wished to interfere with Jewish practice. This challenge led the sages to decree that Diaspora communities would celebrate two festival days instead of one, a practice that continues in many communities today.

Chapter 2

This chapter focuses on the requirements for witnesses who testify to the new moon. The testimony of these witnesses was critical — all Israel’s performance of the mitzvot of observing festivals depended on them — and therefore measures had to be put in place to ensure that testimony was received, and that it was valid.

Chapter 3

This chapter takes up the requirement to sound the shofar on Rosh Hashanah. It must be a shofar and no other kind of horn. The rules for the shofar, the blower and the listener are interrogated. It is determined that the purpose of sounding the shofar is to turn the hearts of Israel toward God in heaven.

Chapter 4

Although it is the central mitzvah of the holiday, the shofar is not blown on Rosh Hashanah when the holiday falls on Shabbat, out of concern that the shofar will be carried in the public domain (the exception to this is the Temple where the shofar was blown every Rosh Hashanah including those that fell on Shabbat). Other issues that crop up when Rosh Hashanah falls on Shabbat are explored.

Toward the end of this chapter, the sages also began to fix the liturgy for Rosh Hashanah, developing themes that entered the Rosh Hashanah Musaf service, which is today the liturgical highpoint of the holiday.

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Let’s start with the end of the final mishnah of this tractate:

Just as the prayer leader is obligated (to recite the prayers), so too, each and every individual is obligated in these prayers.

Rabban Gamliel says: The prayer leader fulfills the obligation on behalf of the many.

Rabban Gamliel — a consummate elitist — believes that the prayer leaders’ recitation can fulfill the obligation of the entire community. He does not believe individuals need to recite the Amidah (this is what the rabbis mean when they speak of “the prayer”) for themselves. But the rabbis strongly disagree.

The Gemara investigates this disagreement, beginning with Rabban Gamliel’s challenge to his colleagues:

Rabban Gamliel said: According to your statement, why does the prayer leader descend before the ark (to recite the Amidah at all)?

They said to him: He does so to fulfill the obligation of one who is not an expert in prayer.

It’s a fair point. Why does the prayer leader repeat the Amidah at all if everyone is individually obligated to say it too? The rabbis respond that it is for those who are not comfortable with the prayers. As the rabbis remind us, there have always been Jews who find prayer difficult, who stumble over the words. If this is you, you stand in a long and distinguished tradition.

To Rabban Gamliel, this distinction between expert and non-expert pray-ers is silly:

Just as he (the prayer leader) can fulfill the obligation of one who is not an expert in prayer, so too, he can fulfill the obligation of the expert.

At first glance, this is a surprisingly generous impulse on Rabban Gamliel’s part, an unwillingness to make a hard division between those who are good at prayer and those who stumble over the words. Rather than saying the prayer leader exists to fulfill the obligation of those who are unable to recite the full liturgy smoothly, and marking those Jews as somehow inadequate, he instead insists the prayer leader is there for all Jews, regardless of their ability. The Gemara will later suggest that the prayer leader is primarily there to fulfill the obligation of Jews who are stuck out in the field and cannot make it into the synagogue to pray.

Rabban Gamliel’s position proves convincing to the rabbis. The Gemara reports that he won this debate — not, as we saw earlier in the tractate, by throwing his weight around, but by being persuasive and democratic. Finally, it is determined that Rabban Gamliel’s statement applies specifically to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — only on those sacred days of awe can the prayer leader’s words fulfill the obligation of the rest of the congregation. Otherwise, people must fulfill their own obligation to pray.

This debate brings us to the end of the tractate, which was brief in comparison to many others we have studied. 

And indeed, the opening of this tractate highlighted the relative insignificance of Rosh Hashanah, situating it as but one of many new years. And, as we were reminded throughout our course of study, the only concrete obligation associated with this “Festival of Remembrance of Sounding” (Leviticus 23:24), is blowing the shofar. It is a holiday with an ambiguous date (first month or seventh month?) and little else besides a fancy trumpet call to distinguish it.

Yet we know that Rosh Hashanah has since come a long way. It is the only festival that is two days long in both the Diaspora and Israel, and it has acquired a rich liturgy — not only the Musaf that we saw being developed in this tractate, but also many other iconic prayers, like Avinu Malkeinu and Unetaneh Tokef. On Rosh Hashanah we enjoy symbolic foods, especially pomegranates and apples and honey and all the other wonderful foods that are part of the Sephardic tradition of a Rosh Hashanah seder. The resonantly tactile tradition of Tashlich is now an integral part of the holiday as well.

This reminds us that the Talmud captures a snapshot of Judaism at a particular moment in time, and that while everything that came afterward is deeply indebted to the Talmud, Judaism has also evolved beyond where it was a millennium and a half ago. And like those who initially stumbled over the words of the Amidah, and Rabban Gamliel who grew in compassion, Rosh Hashanah has matured alongside the other Jewish holidays to become something truly wonderful.

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The Gemara began to address this question on the bottom of yesterday’s daf: 

The sages taught: From where is it derived that the soundings of Rosh Hashanah must be performed with a shofar? The verse (Leviticus 25:9) states: “Then you shall make a proclamation with the blast of the shofar.” 

Well, that seems clear enough — it must be an actual shofar, an animal’s horn. 

Except if we keep reading the verse that the rabbis are quoting from, it ends“… on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the Day of Atonement you shall make proclamation with the shofar throughout all your land.”  The verse isn’t talking about Rosh Hashanah at all — it’s talking about Yom Kippur! And not only that, it’s not even talking about the annual celebration of Yom Kippur, but specifically the Yom Kippur that falls at the end of the 49-year jubilee cycle! 

So how, then, do we get from the rules of a festival that is celebrated twice a century to the rules of a completely different festival celebrated annually? That special brand of textual logic for which the rabbis are famous!

Yesterday’s daf began to answer this question. Reading the verse about the jubilee Yom Kippur carefully, the rabbis point to an apparent redundancy: the text states that this shofar blowing occurs on Yom Kippur and also that it is the seventh month. But we already know that Yom Kippur is in the seventh month! The rabbis read this redundancy as teaching us that “soundings of the seventh month must be similar to one another.” In other words, the redundancy is a clue that if the shofar is required on the Yom Kippur of the jubilee year, it is also required on every other seventh month celebration — including Rosh Hashanah. No tubas allowed. 

Next up for the Gemara: Why do we hear the shofar blasts in three sets of three blasts each? Again, a deep examination of the wording of scripture:

And from where is it derived that there must be three sets of three blasts each? The verse states: “Then you shall make proclamation with the blast of the shofar (teruah)” (Leviticus 25:9); and another verse states: “A solemn rest, a memorial of blasts (teruah)” (Leviticus 23:24); and a third verse states: “It is a day of blasting (teruah) the shofar to you” (Numbers 29:1).

The word for blasting, teruah, is mentioned three times in these verses, hence the custom of three blasts.

Today’s daf continues to mine these verses to explain the details of shofar blowing procedure. Next, instead of using a mild verbal redundancy or three occasions of a signal word as the interpretive hook, the rabbis employ a gezeirah shavah, a verbal analogy, to Leviticus 23:24 which briefly mentions Rosh Hashanah as being“in the seventh month.”  Both Leviticus 23:24, about Rosh Hashanah, and Leviticus 25:9, about the jubilee Yom Kippur, employ the language of “in the seventh month.” This, the rabbis reason, is why on both occasions the blasts sound similarly, and on Rosh Hashanah we therefore have three sets of blasts with teruahs sandwiched between tekiahs.

The Gemara then offers the opinion of another Tanna (early rabbi) who points to an entirely different biblical text to bring to into conversation with Leviticus 23 and its introduction of Rosh Hashanah — Numbers 10, and the instructions given there about how to play a silver trumpet in order to tell the Israelites camped in the desert when it’s time to gather or move. This verbal analogy is more limited, explaining only how the shofar should be blown and not what it’s made of.

It’s worth thinking seriously about how each of verbal analogies, which rely so much on the customs surrounding the jubilee year Yom Kippur, can help shape how we experience listening to the shofar on Rosh Hashanah. The jubilee is about releasing the land and the people from debt, reclaiming inheritances, embracing freedom, creating a societal reset. What would it mean to see the shofar on Rosh Hashanah as not only connected to Yom Kippur but also this ancient cycle, one that most people would have experienced only once in their lifetimes? What would it mean to hear the shofar as a call to action, to gather and to move together toward a better future — not just for ourselves but for the entire world?

Read all of Rosh Hashanah 34 on Sefaria.

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As we have seen on previous pages, many things matter when blowing the shofar: the kind of shofar, the body and intention of the shofar blower, the kinds of blasts blown. The mishnah today adds another factor: the relative length of the blasts. 

The order of the blasts is three sets of three blasts each. The length of a tekiah is equal to three teruot, and the length of a teruah is equal to the length of three yevavot. 

Each tekiah (one long blast) must take up the same amount of time that it would to sound three medium length blasts, or teruot. And how long must each teruah sound be? The same amount of time it would take to blast three yevavot, or whimpers of the horn. 

Responding to this mishnah, the Talmud notes that there appears to be a contradiction between this mishnah and another early teaching (called a beraita):

Isn’t it taught that the length of a teruah is equal to the length of three shevarim?

Apparently the Hebrew word shevarim, which means broken, refers to a different amount of time than the term yevavot, or whimpers. 

So the mishnah says that the teruah is the length of three yevavot, and the beraita says it is the length of three shevarim. What is at the root of this apparent disagreement? The sage Abaye points to a midrash about two biblical verses.

As it is written: “It is a day of sounding (teruah) the shofar to you” (Numbers 29:1), and we translate this verse into Aramaic as: “It is a day of yevava to you.”

And it is written about the mother of Sisera (in the song of Deborah): “Through the window she looked forth and wailed (vateyabev).” (Judges 5:28)

In the Book of Judges, the powerful judge Deborah sings of the battle she orchestrated between the Israelites and the Canaanites. It was a stunning victory for the Israelites and though the Canaanite general Sisera crawled away from the battlefield, he was ultimately stabbed to death in the temple by the brave Israelite woman Yael — putting an end to the Israelites’ violent struggle and inaugurating 40 years of peace in the land. Deborah’s song celebrates the victory and mocks the mother of Sisera who is distraught when her son is late in coming home from battle, but soothes herself by calling the Israelite mothers, well, something we can’t write here (literally: “uteruses”) and by thinking of all the booty and captives of war that Sisera is likely bring back.

But regardless of of all these lurid details, for our purposes Abaye thinks that the word that Deborah uses in her song, vateyabev, can help us understand the yevava (same verbal root) which we are apparently supposed to sound on Rosh Hashanah: What kind of sound would a mother worried for her son make?

One sage (in the beraita) holds that this means moanings.

And one sage (in the mishnah) holds that it means whimpers.

Since moaning is a longer sound and whimpering is a shorter sound, we actually split the difference and do both on Rosh Hashanah —  medium length sounds we call shevarim, and shorter sounds that the mishnah calls yevavot and, just to complicate things further, we today call teruot. But going back to our mishnah, all of these sounds must be relative to one another. Many Sephardic and Ashkenazi legal codes interpret this to mean that each tekiah has to be as long as all the blasts of either of the shevarim or the teruah which follows or precedes it. 

So what is the caller actually doing up on the bimah on Rosh Hashanah? In congregations which try to adhere to rabbinic law, the caller doesn’t just call out the blasts; they are actually timing them to ensure that they follow the rabbinic time requirements! So as you are admiring the lung capacity and musical prowess of the shofar blower, spare a moment of appreciation for the other person on the bimah, who is conducting the shofar blowing while doing some very complicated math. 

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The core Jewish prayer, in talmudic times and ever since, is the Amidah. It is said three times a day during the week, and four on Shabbat, Rosh Chodesh and festivals with the inclusion of Musaf, literally the “added” service. (On Yom Kippur, a spiritual high point of the year, the Amidah is said a grand total of five times with the addition of both Musaf and Neilah at the very end of the holiday.)

Though Musaf is recited on many occasions throughout the year, it is especially important, and most elaborately enhanced, on Rosh Hashanah, as is clear from a mishnah on today’s page that attempts to work out the order of blessings in the Rosh Hashanah Musaf:

This is the order of the blessings: One says the first blessing of the patriarchs, then the blessing of God’s great deeds, then the sanctification of God’s name, and one includes the blessings of divine kingship. But he does not blow the shofar yet according to Rabbi Yochanan ben Nuri.

Rabbi Akiva says if you are not going to blow for divine kingship why mention it all together? But you include divine kingship together with sanctifying God’s name and blow and then conclude with the final blessings.

According to this mishnah, the Musaf of Rosh Hashanah opens as all other Amidahs do with the blessing of the patriarchs (and in some synagogues today, matriarchs) and other blessings that praise God. But in the Rosh Hashanah Musaf, these ordinary blessings that begin the Amidah soon give way to a special recitation pronouncing God’s kingship and, according to Rabbi Akiva, sounding the shofar, which is connected to that theme. 

The next mishnah introduces three themes of the Rosh Hashanah Musaf that will be familiar to those who know the modern liturgy:

One does not recite fewer than ten verses in the blessing of kingship, or fewer than ten for remembrances, or fewer than ten verses for shofars.

Rabbi Yochanan ben Nuri says: If one recited three from each of them, he has fulfilled his obligation. 

The verses on these three themes — malchuyot (divine kingship), zichronot (remembrance) and shofarot (literally “shofars”) — are a central piece of the Rosh Hashanah Musaf as it has come down to us.

The Gemara begins analyzing this mishnah by asking why the number ten? It proposes that the number ten corresponds to praises (hallelujahs) that David said in the Book of Psalms. But, the Gemara asks, aren’t there many more praises than that in the Book of Psalms? Indeed, it actually refers to the number of times that the precise phrase “praise him” (halleluhu) appears in the very last psalm, Psalm 150.

In contrast, Rabbi Yosef suggests that the ten verses correspond to the Ten Commandments, which were said to Moses at Sinai. Rabbi Yochanan says that they correspond to the ten utterances through which the world was created by God, one for each time that it says “and he said” in Genesis 1. When the Gemara then points out that there are only nine instances of this precise phrase it goes on to include Genesis 1:1, “In the Beginning, God created,” as the tenth.

All of this directly informs the Rosh Hashanah Musaf today. Today’s Musaf includes three sections — malchuyot, zichronot, and shofarot — with ten biblical quotations on each of these three themes that are drawn from the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings. This is capped off by sounding the shofar before we return to the normal conclusion of the Amidah. This is why the Rosh Hashanah Musaf is very long — and also the liturgical highlight of the morning.

I find it fascinating the fluidity of traditions and opinions that seem to have coexisted, both about the structure of the Rosh Hashanah Musaf and the reasons that we are said to recite ten verses on each of these three significant themes. The Gemara is perfectly comfortable not rendering a final decision. Nonetheless, the core blessings and structure mentioned here have survived more or less intact over thousands of years. 

Similarly, the Gemara goes on to debate how many sounds we are supposed to hear from the shofar. The rabbis aren’t in complete agreement, though they are, interestingly enough, satisfied with far fewer than the 100 we are accustomed to nowadays.

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Rabbi Yehoshua ben Korha said: And this, too, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai instituted, that even if the head of the court of seventy-one is in any other place, not where the Great Sanhedrin is in session, the witnesses should nevertheless go only to the place where the Great Sanhedrin gathers to deliver testimony to determine the start of the month. Although the date of the month is dependent on the head of the Great Sanhedrin, as it is he who declares that the month is sanctified (see 24a), nevertheless, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai instituted that the members of the Great Sanhedrin may sanctify the month in the absence of the head of the court.

In other words, if the head of the rabbinic court is somewhere other than the site of the court itself, the messengers who come to testify that they have seen the new moon report to the court, not to the chief judge. This ruling makes perfect sense. We’ve seen already that delaying this testimony can have significant consequences for when holidays are observed, so it seems only prudent that witnesses report to the court rather than try to figure out where the head of the court might be at any given moment. 

The Gemara then brings a fascinating story that illustrates why this ruling is important even in matters other than the certification of the new moon. 

There was a certain woman who was called to judgment before Ameimar in Nehardea. Ameimar temporarily went to Mehoza, and she did not follow him to be judged there. He wrote a document of excommunication concerning her, for disobeying the court. Rav Ashi said to Ameimar: Didn’t we learn in the mishnah: Even if the head of the court of seventy-one is in any other place, the witnesses should go only to the place where the Great Sanhedrin gathers? This shows that one must appear in the court itself, rather than follow the head of the court. 

Ameimar was the head of the court as well as the leader of the rabbinical academy in Nehardea. As chief judge, he held this woman in contempt of court because she did not go to see him personally, but instead went to the location of the court. Rav Ashi, Ameimar’s contemporary, finds fault with this reaction, quoting the mishnah we just read saying that the authority of the court is where the court is — not where the chief judge is. 

The Gemara then records Ameimar’s reply: 

Ameimar said to him: This applies only to testimony to determine the start of the month, for which it is necessary to have a fixed place. The reason is that if so, if the witnesses come to court when the head of the court is absent and they will have to go to another place, consequently you will be obstructing them for future occasions, as they will consider it too much trouble and perhaps, they will not come the next time. Therefore, the sages said that these witnesses should go to the regular place where the Great Sanehdrin meets. However, here, with regard to monetary claims, the verse states: “The borrower is servant to the lender” (Proverbs 22:7), i.e., the defendant must act as is convenient to the claimant and the court.

Ameimar says that the ruling of the mishnah only applies to testimony about the sighting of the new moon, explaining that if moon witnesses have to run around looking for the head of the court in order to fulfill their task, they might become irritated and abdicate responsibility for doing so. This is a different case, Ameimar says. 

Ameimar then brings a verse from Proverbs that seems to prove the opposite. The verse seems to indicate that the borrower (in this case the Nehardean woman) is subject to the lender and therefore we make it as easy as possible for them to come to court so as to maximize the likelihood that the lender can recoup their money. This explanation seems to side not with Ameimar, who says litigants must come to the judge, but with Rav Ashi, who says they just come to the court. 

So what’s the final ruling for this poor woman in Nehardea? The Gemara doesn’t tell us. But the passage does seem to indicate that consideration for witnesses and litigants trumps the convenience (and authority) of any one judge. 

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At first, during the Temple era, the lulav was taken in the Temple all seven days of Sukkot, and in the rest of the country outside the Temple, it was taken only one day, on the first day of the festival. After the Temple was destroyed, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai instituted that the lulav should be taken even in the rest of the country all seven days, in commemoration of the Temple.

In Temple times, the lulav and etrog were taken — i.e. shaken — only on the first day of Sukkot everywhere outside Jerusalem. But after the Temple’s destruction, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai ruled that they should be taken for the duration of the holiday in commemoration of how things were done in the Temple, which continues to be our practice today. 

Taking up the lulav on all seven days of Sukkot is one of several ways we commemorate the rituals performed in the Temple. Others include the Tisha B’Av mourning rituals, Torah study and prayer in place of Temple sacrifices, and more. 

But on today’s daf, the Gemara asks a deeper question: Why should we take such pains to remember the Temple? The answer might seem self-evident — after all, the Temple functioned as the center of Jewish worship for centuries and Jews today still pray for its rebuilding. Of course we should remember the Temple.

But as ever, the Gemara has something fascinating to teach in its explanation.

And from where do we derive that one performs actions in commemoration of the Temple? As the verse states: “For I will restore health to you, and I will heal you of your wounds, said the Lord; because they have called you an outcast: She is Zion, there is none who care for her.”  (Jeremiah 30:17) This verse teaches by inference that Jerusalem requires caring through acts of commemoration.

Quoting Jeremiah, the sages say we remember the Temple because Jerusalem itself needs us to care about her. And the way we show care is through behavior that demonstrates we remember how Jerusalem used to be. 

The Talmud’s use of a verse from Jeremiah as a prooftext is telling. Jeremiah lived through the destruction of the First Temple, and his image of Jerusalem is of a living, breathing entity. As it says at the start of the Book of Lamentations, traditionally attributed to Jeremiah as well: “Alas! Lonely sits the city once great with people! She that was great among nations is become like a widow; the princess among states is become a thrall.”

Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai too lived through the destruction of the Temple — the Second Temple, 600 years after Jeremiah. The Gemara was written hundreds of years after that. So how is it that these rabbis living in the early Middle Ages had a concept of what it means to have had a Temple so rich that they would insist on creating rituals to compensate for its absence?

Because Jewish leaders for hundreds of years before them had instilled the importance of the Temple in such a way that the rabbis of the Gemara and beyond — even into our own time — could understand and impart what the Temple represented, and what a loss its destruction meant.

Of course, we live in a time when Jerusalem (if not the Temple) has been rebuilt — it is once again “a city great with people.” And yet, we still observe Tisha B’Av, we still study and pray instead of offering Temple sacrifices, and we shake the lulav all seven days of Sukkot (except for Shabbat).

Remembering, according to the Talmud, isn’t just about words — it’s about action. And those actions in memory of the Temple don’t just have the effect of personifying Jerusalem. They bring Jerusalem, the Temple and Judaism itself alive for the next generation.

That’s what Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai — the man who created an academy at Yavneh to ensure that Jewish learning would continue in the wake of the Temple — was going for. It’s now our job to actively remember our history and teach it to the next generation. And for those of us who can study Talmud not only in a book, but on a website or a podcast, it has never been more possible — or more exciting — to do so.

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Exodus 17:11 explains: “As long as Moses held up his hands, the Israelites were winning, but whenever he lowered his hands, the Amalekites were winning.”  Indeed, according to the story, Moses’ hands were so crucial to the course of the battle that when he got tired, his brother Aaron and another man named Hur first supported him with a stone, and then literally held Moses’ arms up for the duration of the battle.

Why would Moses raising his hands lead to decisive victory and not Joshua’s battle tactics? Exodus 17 doesn’t say. Today’s mishnah, however, offers an explanation:

As long as the Jewish people turned their eyes upward and subjected their hearts to their Father in Heaven, they prevailed. But if not, they fell.

The mishnah suggests that Moses’ upraised hands, visible from his perch on the mountain overlooking the battle with the Amalekites, reminded the Israelites of their relationship to God — and it was that relationship, and Israel’s continued faith in God, that ultimately led to their victory.

The mishnah then offers another example of how this works, referencing another strange story, this time in the Book of Numbers. According to Numbers 21, the people of Israel speak out against God and Moses, angry that they are still wandering and have not yet reached the Promised Land. God does not take this criticism lightly and sends “fiery serpents against the people. They bit the people and many of the Israelites died”  (Numbers 21:6). Devastated by the plague of vipers, the people repent of their sin and Moses intercedes for them with God. God advises Moses to make a “fiery figure” and mount it on a standard. Anyone who looks at this object, God promises, will recover from their snake bites. Remarkably, this works! Moses makes a copper serpent, mounts it on a pole, and when people are bitten by snakes they need only look at it to be healed. 

There’s actually a technical term for what’s happening here with the fake snake — sympathetic magic. Sympathetic magic is a form of ritual in which someone tries to control a person or thing by using an object that corresponds to it. If snakes are causing problems, then creating a metallic snake and binding it to a stick might work to bind or control the living snakes. 

The mishnah, however, interprets the snake episode differently, centering God even more explicitly in the ritual:

When the Jewish people turned their eyes upward and subjected their hearts to their Father in Heaven, they were healed, but if not, they rotted.

It’s not that the snake on the pole had magic power, any more than Moses’ hands did. It was simply a way to redirect people’s attention back to God. Just as in the story of Amalek, the mishnah insists that it is through an active engagement with God that healing and salvation occur. 

There’s a lot of rich stuff going on here — ideas about the nature of warfare, healing magic, the relationship between the Jews and God, sparkly snakes on poles and more. But while the mishnah plants the seeds for a fascinating discussion, the authors of the Talmud just don’t engage. There is, in fact, no talmudic discussion about these strange stories. Did the rabbis think the mishnah’s explanations were sufficient? Did they not know what to do with them? Did they just not care in this context? The Talmud doesn’t say.

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Who compelled him to eat the matzah? Let’s say that a demon forced him.

Today’s daf revisits one of the thorniest and highest-stakes issues in all of observant life: Does the performance of mitzvot require intent (kavanah)?

The issue flows naturally from yesterday’s daf, on which we established that fulfilling the mitzvah of shofar is dependent on the listener and not just the blower. Today the Talmud extends the conversation to its logical conclusion: Is it possible that, even after the sounds have arrived at the listener’s ear, the listener can mess things up because they have misinterpreted what they have heard? What if the blower did not mean to perform a mitzvah at all?

The answer, at least initially, seems to be “no” — intention isn’t essential. Shmuel’s father relates, incredibly, that a person who has been force-fed matzah — perhaps by demons, perhaps by Persians — has nonetheless fulfilled the mitzvah to eat matzah. This leads Rava to rule that a person can fulfill the obligation to hear the shofar even if the blower is, say, just trying to make music.

The Talmud then takes things one crucial step further: Perhaps, Rava does not think intent is required to perform mitzvot at all? This explodes the discussion because it cannot possibly be true. We know from the mishnah, for example, that a person who happens to be reading the Shema isn’t “praying” unless they intend to do so, and we also know that a person who overhears the shofar or the scroll of Esther (on Purim) still needs to “focus their heart” in order to fulfill those obligations. In other words, there’s good evidence that intention matters in some circumstances.

The Gemara tries to finagle its way out of this debate by lowering the bar for “intent,” so that it doesn’t require any kind of spiritual intent at all. For example, what if “intent” for the shofar can be as simple as being aware it’s a shofar that you’re hearing? Or what if a person reading the Shema is actually proofreading the text and they’re just sort of mumbling along, so “intent” just requires saying the actual words? What if a person playing the shofar as music is actually making atypical shofar sounds, so “intent” just requires making normal shofar sounds?

These strategies are interesting, but they point to deeper problems. It’s possible there wasn’t supposed to be a global rule about intent at all. But more importantly, the very concept of intent starts to fall apart the more you look at it, because human awareness is not a yes/no sort of affair. Outside of criminal cases, in which intent is a legal determination made on the basis of evidence, it is often true that the only person who can determine your intent is — you.

Among some observant Jews, this can lead to self-guessing one’s own mind: Did I really have the proper focus while lighting candles, laying tefillin, or making a blessing over my food — and if I didn’t, how would I know? The Jewish mystical practice of reciting kavanot, in which a person audibly and elaborately articulates their intent before performing a mitzvah, is one solution — but of course, who is to say that a well-trod kavanah will not simply become another rote and mindless practice? We might call this “kavanahcreep,” and ultimately until the mind-body problem is solved it may have no solution.

This is not just a Jewish problem either. The medieval Muslim philosopher Al-Ghazali (d. 1111) declared that all ceremonial acts (idabat, what Jews would call “mitzvot between a person and God”) require verbal or mental intent (niyyah), but this position was heavily disputed by others, except around prayer where all agreed that it was required. 

Ultimately, human beings often find themselves wishing that they could pay a little more attention, and inevitably the realities of life and the nature of consciousness always get in the way — no demons or Persians required.

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The rules for the former, at first glance, seem straightforward: Use the right kind of horn. Don’t put gold around the shofar’s mouthpiece. Don’t use a broken shofar, even if you glued it back together. Make sure the blasts are the right duration, and don’t blow the shofar at the same time as you blow another instrument. Don’t mutilate the shofar, don’t turn the shofar inside out — and in the event that you find yourself blowing a shofar inserted inside of another shofar, make sure it is the sound of the inner one that people hear. 

We’ve already discussed some of these rules, and a few are self-explanatory. The rule about blowing the shofar alone might be the most interesting of the bunch, since it relies on a theory — recently elaborated by Lynn Kaye in her book about time in the Babylonian Talmud — that simultaneity is divine. For the rabbis of the Talmud, God alone can say two things at once, and hearing two things at once is also an exclusively divine trait.

So there are rules for the blower. But there are rules for the listener and chief among them is that one must hear the sound of the shofar and not an echo of that sound. This might come up if, say, you were hearing the sound of the shofar from the bottom of a pit or cistern. 

Figuring out the reason for this prohibition is harder than it looks. A modern might say that we want listeners to perceive the oscillations in the air before they have had a chance to bounce off anything; framed this way, the rules for shofar sound a little like the rules for a kosher mikveh, which require a certain amount of water that has fallen straight from the sky without humans interfering with it along the way. But this just isn’t how sound works. Unless you are hearing the shofar in an anechoic chamber, the sound you hear will always be a mixture of the sound that went straight to your ears and the sound that bounced around the room. In the podcasting business we call this amalgam of echoes reverb.

But the ancient rabbis didn’t know about reverb, and their understanding of echoes and sound itself was likely quite different from our own. Exactly how sound propagated was unknown until the early modern period, when — ironically — echoes became an important tool to understand the mechanism of sound transmission. This is to say that a person curious about the Talmud’s concern with echoes may need to begin by studying the history and mythology of echoes. I leave the invitation open — if you figure something out, please let me know!

What confounds all of this, however, is that none of this rigmarole about blowing and hearing the shofar seems to be in the service of engendering the experience of any specific sound. In fact, says Rabban Gamliel, “all shofar sounds are fit” — that is, we care about the procedure for making and hearing that sound, but not the sound itself. What, then, are all these rules trying to preserve — and what should we make of the disdain for echoes and deformed horns?

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Rabbi Yosei said: But aren’t all shofars called “horn”? As it is stated: “And it shall come to pass, that when they sound a long blast with the horn (keren) of a ram.” (Joshua 6:5)

The mishnah at the top of today’s daf starts by saying that every shofar is a kosher shofar— except for the horn of a cow, which is called keren (horn), not shofar, and thus is excluded. Rabbi Yosei immediately challenges this thin line of reasoning, noting that every shofar can also be called a keren since, after all, it is made from a horn, and sometimes they actually are — as for instance in Joshua 6:5.

The Talmud picks at this thread further by continuing this lexical conversation, trying to fathom the true difference between keren and shofar and what the latter is actually supposed to mean. For instance, in support of Rabbi Yosei, the discussion includes the following ingenious folk etymology of the word shofar: 

And how would Rabbi Yosei counter this argument? He could have said to you: The horns of a cow are also calledshofar, as it is written: “And it shall please the Lord better than an ox bull (shor par) that has horns and hoofs”  (Psalms 69:32). The wording of the verse is strange: If it is an ox (shor), why is it also called a bull (par), and if it is a bull (par), why is it called an ox (shor)? Rather, what is the meaning of shor par? Read them as one single word: shofar.

But this language play soon gives way to another, far more interesting reason to bar the use of cow horns as shofars: It might remind God of the Golden Calf that the Jews created while waiting for Moses to come down from Mount Sinai, literally weeks after being commanded by God not to create or worship idols. Raising God’s ire on Rosh Hashanah, at the moment of judgment (recall, as we noted at the beginning of this tractate, that blowing the shofar is the signal biblical commandment attached to Rosh Hashanah), was thought to be very poor judgment; as Rav Hisda memorably put it: “a prosecutor cannot become a defense advocate.” (The “calf” part wasn’t the only problem, either; the use of gold was restricted somewhat in the Temple’s Holy of Holies for the same reason, and that is why plating the shofar’s mouthpiece with gold was verboten, too.)

Then the Talmud, as it so often does, pivots from a discussion of the language we use for horn instruments to a larger discussion of how we suss out the meaning of obscure words in the first place. While the Talmud gives examples of using biblical references or asking the person using the word to use it in a bunch of different sentences, it spends most of this section relating a series of anecdotes about words — including biblical words — whose meaning was not understood until a rabbi overheard it from someone outside the rabbinic circle: Rabbi Yehuda’s maidservant (an Arab), or someone speaking the dialect of a particular region. The Bible, in other words, is understood as a puzzle to which the rabbis did not have all the pieces.

My personal journey to understanding Jewish law took me through Islamic law, and so when I read these stories I thought immediately of the Quran, which has the distinction of being not only a text sacred to Muslims but also one of the very first Arabic texts, period. The language of the Quran matters a lot, but without contemporaneous works with which to compare it, early Muslim scholars had nowhere to turn to understand its vocabulary and syntax other than the peoples of Arabia, whose understanding and use of Arabic was given a kind of semi-sacred status. In their effort to turn this oral knowledge into a coherent set of rules and comprehensive lexicons, Muslim scholars effectively developed linguistics as a discipline, and — as with philosophy, astronomy, and jurisprudence — these ideas soon found their way into Jewish scholarship, too.

Armed with these new linguistic tools, Jews not only started exploring Hebrew grammar on its own terms, but also as it related to Arabic, the Semitic language next door. Whereas Muslims were reticent to draw comparisons to Hebrew, out of concern that it would diminish Arabic, Jews were more than willing to draw connections — and this helps explain how it came to be that an Algerian Jew named Judah ibn Kuraish became the first person to write a work of comparative philology.

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As we have discussed, a new month was declared when two witnesses came to the court and gave sworn testimony that they had seen the new moon in the night sky. The mishnah on today’s daf records a time when witnesses gave testimony about lunar observations that were clearly not physically possible: A new moon was seen one night, but on the next night there was no moon at all. Rabbi Dosa ben Horkinas scoffed at this testimony, saying: Can a woman give birth one day and be visibly pregnant the next?

But Rabban Gamliel declared a new month anyway. Why he did this is not clear; rabbis by this time did have calendrical calculations at their disposal, and Rabban Gamliel — the man who had moon charts in his attic — may have been using witness testimony as a way of legitimizing mathematical decisions he might have made anyway. Alternatively, he may have decided for the sake of deciding — either because the calendar was too important to mess with or because of his personality. Regardless of the reason, a showdown was about to take place.

When Rabbi Yehoshua challenged the ruling, Rabban Gamliel responded decisively. Rather than entertaining the alternate position, and doubtless knowing that what he had declared did not match the astronomical evidence, he ordered Rabbi Yehoshua to publicly denounce his own position by appearing before Rabban Gamliel with his staff and money on the day that, according to Rabbi Yehoshua, should have been Yom Kippur. 

In other words, Rabban Gamliel ordered Rabbi Yehoshua to violate Yom Kippur on the day that Rabbi Yehoshua and all their colleagues knew to be the “correct” date for that holiday.

What was the right thing to do? Two rabbis spoke with Rabbi Yehoshua and encouraged him not to resist — and offered him textual grounds for conceding to Rabban Gamliel. For Rabbi Akiva, the fact that the Bible says that festivals are what “you should proclaim” (Leviticus 23:4) suggests that calendrical power is vested in humans, not God — even if those humans are wrong. Even Rabbi Dosa, who had criticized Rabban Gamliel’s logic using the memorable analogy of a pregnant woman, admitted that the ruling should stand — because if it did not, what was to prevent a second-guessing of all rulings going back to Moses?

And so, Rabbi Yehoshua did what he was told:

Rabbi Yehoshua took his staff and his money in his hand, and went to Yavne to Rabban Gamliel on the day on which Yom Kippur occurred according to his own calculation. Rabban Gamliel stood up and kissed him on his head. He said to him, “Come in peace, my teacher and my student: my teacher in wisdom, and my student in accepting my position.”

The Talmud, in unpacking this story, dilutes it somewhat, suggesting that Rabban Gamliel was not making a case for the power of his personal authority over the movement of heavenly bodies, but simply enacting a different understanding of what was physically possible. At the same time, the Talmud also defends Rabban Gamliel by suggesting that leaders need not be great on an absolute scale; they just need to be the best that the era has to offer.

This wasn’t the first time we’ve seen Rabban Gamliel wield authority like a bludgeon, particularly against Rabbi Yehoshua. Remember Berakhot 27 and Berakhot 28? It didn’t end so nicely in that case. Nor was the fight we read about here the last of its kind in Jewish history. In 921 and 922 CE, a bitter calendrical dispute played out between the leaders of the Palestinian and Babylonian Jewish communities, in which latter disputed the calendar announced by the former.

The dispute seems to have been years in the making. The Palestinian rabbis had traditionally been responsible for the calendar, but over time the Babylonian academies — which were much larger — started to question that authority, perhaps under the influence of Abbasid astronomy, a discipline in which several rabbis of the era were actively engaged. Remnants of the dispute have been found in both the Cairo Genizah and the writing of Saadiah Gaon, who was once thought to have come to public prominence by means of this dispute. Previous studies suggested that the dispute ended in Tishrei 922 with a clear Babylonian victory, but recent scholarship led by Sacha Stern suggests that the truth is much messier: Saadiah was not the major player in this story, and the conclusion wasn’t really conclusive after all.

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Rabban Gamliel had a diagram of the different forms of the moon drawn on a tablet that hung on the wall of his attic, which he would show to the laymen (who came to testify about the new moon). And he would say to them: Did you see a form like this or like this?

The new moon is not, as some suppose, a lack of a moon in the sky, but the first tiny sliver of moon that is visible after the last month’s moon has truly disappeared. And this is why identifying it can be confusing. How do you know if you are looking at the last tiny sliver of the old moon, or the first tiny sliver of the new one? The answer is in which direction it faces. If it looks like a C, open on the right, then it is the old moon. If it is curved like a backwards C, open on the left, then it is the new moon. Likely, Rabban Gamliel used his moon charts to check whether or not witnesses had seen a moon that faced the correct direction.

Though the use of this chart was practical, the other sages were concerned that having this chart was a violation of Jewish law. As the Gemara immediately remarks:

​​And is it permitted (to hang a moon chart)? Isn’t it written: “You shall not make with me gods of silver, or gods of gold” (Exodus 20:20)? Meaning: You shall not make images of my attendants.

The verse cited here, Exodus 20:20, comes right after the recitation of the Ten Commandments and is of a piece with the prohibition on creating a graven image found in Exodus 20:4: “You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth.”

The rabbis read Exodus 20:20 to mean that it is not just making an image of God that is prohibited, but also making an image of any of God’s heavenly attendants — which could be interpreted to include the celestial bodies, among them the moon.

It seems difficult for the rabbis to imagine an image of the moon would not be used for worship. On the other hand, the rabbis wonder, perhaps as the nasi, the head of the community, Rabban Gamliel can be trusted to use the moon images correctly and is permitted behaviors that might be forbidden to others. They argue this back and forth down our page.

Often the rabbis let disagreements stand unresolved, but in this case they manage to agree on a compromise  — one that has repercussions for Jewish practice today:

If you wish, say that Rabban Gamliel did this to teach himself, as it is written: “You shall not learn to do after the abominations of those nations”  (Deuteronomy 18:9), which indicates: However, you may learn to understand and to teach. 

The strange language of Deuteronomy 18:9, that one should not “learn” to commit abominations (like idolatry), suggests to the midrashic mind that one may “learn” in order to serve God. In other words, it is permitted to do certain things that would otherwise be prohibited — like decorate one’s attic with moon charts — for the sake of Torah study and divine service.

L’shem hinuch — for the purpose of education — is a principle to which we turn today. Can we say the Hanukkah blessings at 9 a.m. in a preschool classroom? Can we say the blessing over matzah at a model seder two weeks before Passover? Can we draw a star chart or the phases of the moon on our wall without concern that it will become an object of idolatrous worship? Yes, say the rabbis, if it is for the purposes of better understanding our traditions and teaching them to others.

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How would they light the torches? They would bring long poles of cedar, reeds, pinewood, and beaten flax, and tie them with a string. Then someone would ascend to the top of the mountain and light the torch on fire and wave it back and forth and up and down, until he would see his colleague doing likewise on the top of the second mountain. And similarly, on the top of the third mountain.

And from which mountains would they light the torches? From the Mount of Olives to Sartava, and from Sartava to Gerofina, and from Gerofina to Havran, and from Havran to Beit Baltin. And from Beit Baltin they would not move (in a specific direction). Rather, the one who was appointed for this task would wave the torch back and forth and up and down, until he would see the entire Diaspora before him alight like one large bonfire.

Once a new month was declared, a signal torch was vigorously waved on the top of the Mount of Olives, just opposite the Jerusalem Temple, until a torchbearer on the next mountain, in Sartava, picked up the signal and lit their own torch. In this way, the message was transmitted from one mountaintop to the next all the way into the Diaspora. At that point, the mishnah tells us, the path would cease to be linear. Instead, the signal would spread in all directions until the entire Diaspora was alight. Another teaching quoted in the Gemara explains this last part in finer detail:

Each and every individual would take a torch in his hand and ascend to the top of his roof.

No longer the duty of a few designated signalers, once we reach the Diaspora every homeowner becomes a bearer of the news that a new month has arrived. Rabbis, take note: Surely, there is a sermon in here about Jews in Diaspora and the transmission of tradition.

Naturally, this all had to be done after dark. One imagines that, in an era of very little light pollution, this cascade of fires created a gorgeous display.

The rabbis of the Gemara immediately set to work determining how this would work. Does one signal the start of every new month? Perhaps it is necessary to only signal those months that are short. Or perhaps better to only signal those that are long (30 days). In addition, the signal can only be transmitted once the new moon has been observed, which creates other challenges. For instance, certain kinds of work were suspended on the first of the month. Someone in Diaspora waiting for the signal might end up observing two days of work suspension while waiting for the signal.

And what if the new month began on Friday? Because of the prohibition against lighting a fire on Shabbat, one would have to delay the signal until Saturday night, which might sow confusion. Multiple solutions to these challenges are posed, though as we know from yesterday’s page, by rabbinic times the signal system had long been defunct, retired after interfering sectarians took to lighting decoy fires in an attempt to establish their own calendar.

The Gemara next teases out the kinds of materials that could be used for these torches. It is here that we find a delightful aside about mining treasure from the sea. After coralwood (a subspecies of cedar) is mentioned as one of the fuels used for these torches, the rabbis then explain how coral (same name, different material) was harvested from the water by thousands of workers. This crew would fill a boat with sand, sink it, tie flaxen ropes to both the boat and the coral, then remove all the sand from the boat and float it back up with the coral. The process was so cumbersome that coral was considered precious — double the price of pure silver. 

Speaking of expensive materials, the Gemara explains that some of these woods were especially nice — like myrtle. Today we’ll close with another gem of an aside, touched off by the mention of this species:

Rabbi Yohanan said: Anyone who studies Torah but does not teach it is likened to a myrtle in the wilderness. 

Myrtle smells lovely, but in the wilderness there is no one to enjoy its fragrance. Likewise, Rabbi Yohanan teaches, a Torah scholar with no one to teach is a beautiful thing, but not positioned to best advantage. Yet the Gemara seems troubled by the implication that a Torah scholar without students is lacking in value, and offers a more optimistic version:

There are those who say: Anyone who studies Torah and teaches it to others in a place where there are no other Torah scholars is likened to a myrtle in the wilderness, which is especially precious.

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On today’s page, we encounter the first mishnah of the second chapter which teaches that:

Initially, the court would accept testimony to determine the start of the month from any person. However, when the Boethusians corrupted the process (by sending false witnesses to testify about the new moon), the sages instituted that they would accept this testimony only from those who were familiar to them.

Who were the Boethusians and why would they do this? During the Second Temple period, there were deep divisions in the Jewish community. In particular, there was a strong rivalry between the ruling priestly class (of which the Boethusians seem to have been one group, though not the predominant one known as the Sadducees) and the Pharisees (the forerunners of the rabbis, literally “those who separated.”) They clashed over points of law and also the dates of holidays. Bringing false witness to the Sanhedrin was a way for the Boethusians to foil the Pharisees and fix the calendar according to their own preference. 

To pull this off, the Gemara explains through a beraita (another early rabbinic teaching), the witnesses had to be bribed:

The sages taught: What did the Boethusians do? They tried to mislead the sages. They hired two people for four hundred dinars to give false testimony. One of ours, and one of theirs.

The Boethusians were sneaky. They sent two witnesses who had been bribed to lie about seeing the new moon, and while one of them was a loyal Boethusian, the other was a Pharisee they managed to buy. This made it extra difficult for the sages to figure out which testimony to trust.

This was not an isolated incident — there are more stories of calendrical manipulation on our page. The mishnah we encounter on the second side says that originally the Jews used to light bonfires to transmit the news of the new month from hilltop to hilltop, across the land, and beyond to the Diaspora. This was an efficient means of communication — the message could travel literally at the speed of light. But then, the mishnah continues, the Cutheans began to undermine them by lighting decoy fires on the wrong day. The Sanhedrin was forced to stop using signal fires and send out messengers they could rely on. 

So who were the Cutheans? And what was the difference between them and the Boethusians? Normally the Hebrew name Cuti applies to the Samaritans, who like the Sadducees accepted the Torah but not rabbinic authority, but they have a very different back story. We know about them from the 2 Kings 17. When the Assyrians conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel located in Samaria, they exiled and scattered the conquered people and replaced them with victims from elsewhere to ensure that they would not be able to reconstitute as a threat. These new inhabitants of Samaria were plagued by wild animals and assumed it was because they did not worship the local gods. They asked for priests to come from the south to teach them how to worship the local God and then coexisted with the Judeans until they too were exiled.

When the Judeans returned under Cyrus, the Samaritans (as they were called) claimed that they were the rightful Israelites. After years of conflict, the Judeans prevailed, and the Samaritans were regarded as heretics. By the era of the rabbis, this group claimed that, contra the biblical account, they were actually the remnants of the northern tribe of Joseph left behind by the Assyrians and had always been Israelites. Even so, and despite their refusal to accept rabbinic authority, they were often accepted because they adhered so strictly to biblical laws. 

So did the rabbis really tangle with every sect over the calendar? And were all the different sects really prone to pulling these kinds of pranks to fix the calendar? Not likely. It’s more probable that something else is going on here.

As Christianity challenged Judaism, the censors were highly sensitive to anything that could be taken as an insult to them. It is likely that, so as to avoid giving offense they often intentionally used different names for sectarians to throw the censors off track. Which probably explains why it is so difficult to identify exactly who the rabbis were really referring to in the versions of the texts that have come down to us. 

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Little did I know then about a lovely little sugya on today’s daf.

For context, the Gemara has been discussing the observance of two-day holidays outside of Israel. Before learning to calculate the moon’s phases precisely, Jews outside Israel relied on messengers to tell them when the new moon had been sighted and declared in Jerusalem. But the messengers took some time to arrive and things could get confusing, so major holidays were (and for many, continue to be) celebrated for two days in the Diaspora, ensuring their observance aligned for at least part of the time.

But this is not the case with Yom Kippur, and the reasons are pretty obvious: If a daylong fast is rough, fasting for nearly 50 hours is a terrible, life-endangering idea, as alluded to in the Jerusalem Talmud.

But on today’s daf, we learn that not everyone respected that bit of common sense:

The Gemara relates that Rava would regularly sit in observance of the fast of Yom Kippur for two days, in case Elul had been declared a thirty-day month and Yom Kippur should be observed on what was observed in Babylonia as the eleventh of Tishrei. It once happened in accordance with his opinion. Elul had been declared a thirty-day month, and he was the only one who observed Yom Kippur on the correct day.

So at least one of our ancestors would fast for two days of Yom Kippur. Yikes. 

Now perhaps you’re thinking this idea died back in Rava’s time. Nope! The 13th-century work Sefer Mitzvot Katan acknowledges that some people fast for two days, “but it is an additional stringency.” Going a bit further, Peretz ben Elijah of Corbeil quotes Meir ben Baruch of Rothenburg as saying that anyone who fasts for two days on Yom Kippur must do so forever, since once this particular commandment has been accepted it cannot later be surrendered. 

Centuries later, Rabbi Moshe Isserles, better known as the Rema and the author of a commentary on the Shulchan Arukh, ruled that this practice should not be followed because it’s dangerous. Nevertheless, it must have persisted in the next century and beyond, because several major authorities discussed the ritual and liturgical implications of a two-day fast. 

As the Jerusalem Talmud suggests, the possibility of serious self-harm is reason enough not to fast for two consecutive days. And if my response to the inquiry mentioned in the opening paragraph wasn’t clear enough, the practice is virtually unheard of these days. While appreciating the piety of Rava and others, it’s easier, safer and healthier to find other ways of expressing our devotion.

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Of course, for Rosh Hashanah, which falls on the first of the month of Tishrei, it would be difficult to get the word out on time. But not to worry, we learned yesterday that: 

Rav said: From the days of Ezra and onward, we have never found that the month of Elul had an additional day.

The month of Elul precedes Tishrei. Rav is saying that for centuries Elul has always (miraculously?) been a predictable 29 days. This means that if communities knew when Elul began, they could calculate the correct date for Rosh Hashanah (and the other Tishrei holidays of Yom Kippur and Sukkot) without waiting for word from the Jerusalem court on the first of Tishrei, which would almost assuredly not arrive on time. In fact, given this, why would we ever send messengers out to announce a new month on Tishrei?

As we see today, the Gemara is skeptical of Rav’s confidence that Elul always has 29 days. In fact, here’s what we find:

When Ulla came from the land of Israel to Babylonia, he said: This year they added an extra day to the month of Elul (making it 30 days long). Ulla continued and said: Do our Babylonian colleagues understand the favor we did for them?

Not only does Ulla’s news indicate that Elul was 30 days in that particular year, he explains that the rabbis made this adjustment on purpose so that Rosh Hashanah would not fall on a day adjacent to Shabbat. 

Why would we care if Rosh Hashanah and Shabbat are adjacent? When the two fall alongside one another, the protracted prohibition on labor can become cumbersome for people. As the Gemara explains:

Ulla said: Due to the vegetables that would not be picked for two days and those picked beforehand that would no longer be fresh.

Rabbi Aha bar Hanina said: Due to the dead who would not be buried for two days and consequently would begin to decompose.

While contemporary Jews who observe Shabbat and festival work prohibitions could likely produce a much longer list of the burdens of a multi-day holiday, the Gemara’s focus on harvesting and preserving produce and timely burial of the dead makes sense for its era.

Ulla’s testimony that the rabbis declared Elul to be 30 days long in a given year suggests that there is some tension between the notion that the festival is observed according to the state of the moon and the idea that the rabbis can exercise some control over the calendar. It also contradicts Rav’s notion that Elul is always 29 days. 

Rav’s statement of historical “fact” (Elul is always 29 days) also appears on both Beitzah 6 and Beitzah 22. In those instances, Ulla’s counterexample is not brought up at all. So, if you studied only Tractate Beitzah, but not Rosh Hashanah, you might have assumed that the rabbis all agree that Elul is 29 days. As is so often the case, reading more teaches us that the rabbis agree less. 

Today we use a calendar established by Hillel II in the fourth century that fixes Elul at 29 days, effectively handing Rav the victory. But as Ulla reminds us, this wasn’t always so. 

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Continuing our calendrical discussions, the rabbis are now discussing Megillat Taanit (The Scroll of Fasting), an early Jewish calendar that lists dozens of minor holidays, including Hanukkah and Purim, as days of rejoicing on which it was forbidden to declare a public fast. (As we will see when we get to Tractate Taanit, fasts could be declared at any time in response to communal emergencies.) Megillat Taanit predates the Talmud, having been composed either during the Second Temple period or, as some argue, during the Jewish revolt against Rome in the 1st century C.E. Megillat Taanit was not a closed text. Celebrations — most of which are no longer observed — were added to the list well into the second century.

Our Gemara begins by quoting Megillat Taanit which describes a celebration commemorating the end of anti-Jewish decrees. It is concise:

On the 28th of Adar the good tidings came to the Jews that they need not turn away from the Torah. 

What were they commemorating on the 28th of Adar, midway between Purim and Passover? Quite likely, it was the end of the Hadrianic decrees from the period of the Bar Kochba revolt (circa 129-138 C.E.) that suppressed Jewish life and practice. The Gemara explains: 

For the wicked kingdom issued a decree against Israel that they should not occupy themselves with Torah, and that they should not circumcise their sons, and that they should desecrate Shabbat. What did Yehuda ben Shammua and his colleagues do? They went and took advice from a certain Roman matron (matronita) whom all the prominent men of Rome would visit regularly. She said to them as follows: “Come and cry out (hafgginu) at night.”

They went and cried out at night, saying: “O Heavens! Are we not your brothers; are we not children of one father; are we not children of one mother? How are we different from every other nation and tongue that you issue such harsh decrees against us?” And indeed the decrees were annulled, and they made that day a festive day. 

Yehuda ben Shammua is a relatively unknown hero. The Gemara explains that he is a student of Rabbi Meir, who was one of a small group to survive the Hadrianic persecutions and to continue the work of his teacher Rabbi Akiva, who risked (and incurred) death rather than cease teaching Torah in public. Interestingly, another student of Rabbi Akiva, who was also killed for resisting these decrees, is one Rabbi Elazar Ben Shammua — possibly Yehuda ben Shammua’s older brother. 

The plan that Yehuda ben Shammua and his friends hatch stands in stark contrast to the forms of resistance of earlier generations. Against foreign oppressors Jews have taken up arms; at other times they studied Torah and performed mitzvot in secret, and at times courted martyrdom. But Yehuda ben Shammua’s approach is peaceful and public.

The group consults with a matronita, a wealthy Roman woman of stature who is a staple character throughout the Talmud. The matronita is inquisitive, at times derisive toward Jewish ideas, but she is always imagined in dialogue with the rabbis. In our story, the matronita acts as an advocate for the Jews, helping them strategize about the decrees and the ways of the Romans. She doesn’t tell them to revolt with arms or to risk death by learning Torah, nor to go underground with their books. Rather she suggests a political demonstration: They should make their presence felt, le’hafgin, literally “to externalize,” to vocalize their troubles (in modern Hebrew it comes to mean “to protest”).

Yehuda ben Shammua and his associates march through the streets at night, shouting a chant: As humans, we are just like you, we deserve better! Why are you persecuting us more than other conquered nations? Their chant resonates with other mishnaic statements that all human life is valuable because we descend from a single ancestor, Adam. A millennium later, Shakespeare’s Jewish character Shylock from the Merchant of Venice would make a similar point: “If you prick us do we not bleed?” 

While the Roman history books don’t record a dramatic protest of this sort, shortly following Hadrian’s death, the anti-Jewish decrees were indeed recalled. And it may just be that Yehuda ben Shammua, the younger brother of a martyr, ushered in a new period of political diplomacy.

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Beloreya the convert once asked Rabban Gamliel: It is written in your Torah: “The great, mighty and awesome God who favors no one”  (Deuteronomy 10:17), and elsewhere it is written: “The Lord shall show favor to you and give you peace” (Numbers 6:26).

In this context, “favor” is understood to mean “forgive.” Beloreya seems to be asking: Does God favor no one (Deuteronomy) or does God favor the Jewish people (Numbers)? It’s an incredible challenge — pointing out an apparent inconsistency in the Torah and posing a heart-rending question: Is divine mercy parceled out equitably? Or is God partial to God’s chosen people?

The Gemara relates that a number of rabbis step up to offer explanations that attempt to reconcile the two verses. Most agree that divine forgiveness is sometimes granted and sometimes not, but do not draw the line between Jews and non-Jews. For example, Rabbi Yosei uses a parable to show that God always forgives sins committed between a person and God, but does not forgive sins committed by one person against another — that is up to people to resolve. Rabbi Akiva, in contrast, explains the discrepancy by teaching that God shows favor only if one seeks forgiveness before one’s sentence has been delivered; after the sentence has been issued, God no longer forgives.

Rabbi Meir gives an example of two sick people suffering with similar illnesses who are sentenced to death, but then one recovers (the other does not). He explains that one prayed and was answered, while the other prayed, but was not answered. Further, the one who recovered prayed with his whole heart. Rabbi Elazar interjects that it was because one prayed before being given a sentence and was answered, whereas the other prayed after the sentence was issued, and therefore was not answered.

All of these views, expressing very different opinions about how divine forgiveness works and who will receive it, seem to sidestep the original question of whether atonement and forgiveness are reserved only for Jews or are universal. To get at this, the rabbis return to the mishnah we read on page 16 that stated that on Rosh Hashanah all creatures pass before God like benei maron, a phrase which we translated a few days ago as “a flock of sheep.” The Gemara considers exactly what this looks like:

What is the meaning of the phrase benei maron? In Babylonia, they interpreted it as a flock of sheep (kivnei imarna) who pass one by one while the shepherd counts them. Reish Lakish said that it is like a steep mountain where someone at the top can see everyone climbing up. Rabbi Yehuda said that Shmuel said it is like the soldiers of the house of King David who could be surveyed on parade all together. 

But whether God reviews people one at a time in single file or by gazing down at them all, whether they march in formation or all rush a mountaintop at once, this text from the mishnah suggests that every single person in the world, all creatures, can be forgiven. Atonement is universal.

Or is it? Perhaps you have to be part of that flock to merit divine forgiveness? 

The problem is made more poignant, more urgent, because it has been posed by Beloreya — a convert who was once not a part of the Jewish people, and now is. Did she merit divine forgiveness before she converted? Does she now? Why? 

And here’s another complication: Though Beloreya is a Jew and clearly well-versed in Torah, she also still marks herself as somewhat apart from the people when she addresses Rabban Gamliel using the words “your Torah.” Perhaps we should understand that she is posing this question to him before her conversion. Or perhaps she still feels herself to be in a liminal space, between not Jewish and Jewish.

The Gemara offers no final theology about divine forgiveness, but at least wrestles with the question in a way that makes us aware of the enormous consequences of pronouncing either way.

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Seeing this, God is incensed and threatens to kill the entire people, with the intention of starting a whole new nation with just Moses. In a poignant moment, Moses calms God down and saves the Israelites from obliteration. Then, Moses comes down from Sinai and lets loose: He smashes the tablets of the commandments, burns down the idol, mixes the ashes with water and forces the Israelites to drink it. He next rallies those who are still faithful to God to massacre the rest. Finally, amid the carnage, Moses re-ascends Sinai and more or less demands that God forgive the people — which God does.

In the wake of all of this, there is a great need for healing, on all sides. Exodus 34, which documents much of the aftermath, recounts an intimate encounter between God and Moses:

God came down in a cloud; He stood with him there, and proclaimed the name God. (Exodus 34:5). 

It is a moment of unprecedented physical closeness, and it goes on:

The Lord passed before him and proclaimed: The Lord! The Lord! A God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness, extending kindness to the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin.

These words — sometimes referred to as the 13 Attributes of Mercy — are an indelible part of our Selichot and Yom Kippur liturgy. We recite them leading up to and throughout the holiday, reminding ourselves and God of the promise of divine mercy. Moses leans into these words, and is comforted.

On today’s daf, the rabbis investigate the remarkable image the Torah paints in this scene, of God passing directly before Moses:

“And God passed by before him…” (Exodus 34:6). Rabbi Yohanan said: Were it not explicitly written in the verse, it would be impossible to say this.

The verse is theologically problematic because it places God not just in physical proximity to Moses, but on an equal or lesser plane. On yesterday’s daf, we read that on Rosh Hashanah people pass before God (like sheep streaming past a shepherd) to be judged. Here, it is God who passes before Moses.

This is not the proper order of things. Yet, despite the ways in which this image is problematic for talmudic theology, it is canonized in the Torah. And since it is, as Rabbi Yohanan states, we can accept that such a thing is possible.

As we embrace this image, we might as well also make use of our midrashic imagination and see where that takes us. That’s exactly what the Gemara does: 

God wrapped himself in a prayer shawl like a prayer leader.

Does this make the problem better? In some ways, it presents God even more intimately. If it’s problematic to suggest that God passed before Moses, shouldn’t it be problematic to say that God put on a tallit?

It turns out, as some may recall from Tractate Berakhot, the rabbis are actually plenty comfortable with anthropomorphic images of God. But this one seems to come out of nowhere. Where did they come up with it? 

The image comes from a play on words. The verb that the Torah uses to describe God’s passing before Moses, va’ya’avor, is the same verb that is used to describe a shaliach tzibbur, a prayer leader, who approaches the lectern. So this verb suggests to the rabbis that we might, in this moment, envision God as a shaliach tzibbur. This midrash continues in this vein:

God showed Moses the structure of the order of the prayer. And then God said to him: Whenever the Jewish people sin, let them act before me in accordance with this order. Let the prayer leader wrap himself in a prayer shawl and publicly recite the 13 attributes of mercy, and I will forgive them.

In addition to giving midrashic color to the human-divine encounter of Exodus 34, this midrash gives that encounter a whole new meaning. Now God is not just forgiving Israel once and repairing the relationship in that moment, but God is giving Moses and the people tools to repair it in the future. Because mistakes will happen again. Repair will be necessary again. This is why we recite the 13 Attributes as part of our Selichot (forgiveness) liturgy — because using these words helps ensure God’s forgiveness. Just as it worked for the people at Mount Sinai, so too, we hope it will work for us today.

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