Numbering Our Months by the Light of the Moon

Before Rav Kook was Rav Kook, before he accepted the position of Chief Rabbi in Yafo, he was a noted prodigy of the Lithuanian yeshiva world in Europe, with a bright future ahead of him as the eventual leader of one of its great Jewish communities. In light of the direction taken both by Rav Kook and by the Jewish communities of Europe, this is a period of his life that has been little studied or understood. Just a few years ago, in 5778, an important stride was made in clearing some of the obscurity from these years that were so critical in forming the young Rav Kook – the publication of his notes and sermons beginning from 5648 (1887), when he was appointed rabbi of Zeimel in Lithuania. Rav Kook was at the time only 22 years old.

After just a few years, as his fame and his reputation grew, Rav Kook moved to the much larger community of Boisk, although he never lost his connection to Zeimel nor its inhabitants to him. Rav Kook would not arrive in Yafo-Tel Aviv until 5665 (1904). In his notebooks from Zeimel, Rav Kook’s youth is perhaps most evident in his verbosity. The writings of the mature Rav Kook are exceedingly spare and poetic; he implies much, expresses a great deal with very few words, and most characteristically, soars from idea to idea without pausing to explain the connections between them. It typically fell to the lot of his disciples and to future generations to explain the reasoning behind the Rav’s pronouncements. The young Rav Kook, on the other hand, had much to prove, and he was, after all, educated in the great Lithuanian yeshiva of Volozhin. His youthful essays are extremely erudite, rich in sources, exhaustively researched, and amply demonstrated. These are mostly aimed at highly educated, scholarly readers – indeed, one wonders on the evidence if he really delivered such long and painstakingly intricate sermons to his congregation of farmers and tradesmen.

The two chapters he dedicates to Parshat HaChodesh, which is found in this week’s parsha, contain profound and beautiful insights into the nature of the Nation of Israel and our unique relationship to the moon. I will share some of these insights in greatly reduced and distilled form here.

Hashem tells Moshe, “This month will be for you the beginning (“Rosh,” lit. head) of the months; it is the first (“Rishon”) for you of the months of the year” (Shemot 12:2). Rav Kook asks what the difference is between these two formulations and why they are both necessary. What else could months be, if not months of the year? The first is the first, is it not? The principal distinction that Rav Kook establishes to differentiate between these two formulations is that of the particular and the general principle.

But there is another important nexus with the moon, as opposed to the sun, for the purpose of numbering our months. Chazal teach in a well-known aggada (Chullin 60b) that the moon was reduced after it complained to Hashem that it doesn’t stand to reason there should be two “kings” (i.e., celestial bodies) both ruling the sky. Rav Kook cites the Mechilta on our parsha that this only became an issue after Adam and Chava transgressed the Divine Command and we could no longer perceive the physical universe through the faculty of prophecy (a subject we discussed over the last two weeks). Rav Kook explains that as Israel assigns primacy to the moon in measuring the passage of time, we are connecting our destiny to “true” radiance from the primordial state which is also the revealed light preserved for the end of days. (This, in essence, is prophetic awareness.) He explains that the very continued existence of Israel flies in the face of science and logic – it doesn’t make sense as an historical principle or as an expected outcome from the efforts of our many enemies to eradicate us, all of whom possessed the will and the might to complete that task. But we are still here, still numbering our months by the light of the moon. This is the general principle.

There is another principle (that we have also addressed in this column) that the Torah doesn’t come to teach us what we should already know by common sense or from the exercise of our reason. The Torah adds wisdom and understanding to the intelligence we can achieve by exercising our natural faculties and by becoming learned in the wisdom of the righteous among the gentiles. The Torah offers great inspiration and transcendent awareness, but it is also connected with complicated reasoning and detailed minutiae which are difficult for most people to understand (hence my comment above about Rav Kook’s sermons to the community of Zeimel). Yet the Torah has been given to all of Israel – the wisest and most enlightened, the profound thinkers, and also the common folk who want to know what Hashem expects of them. The Torah can be and must be received and understood by every individual on his or her level.

When the Torah tells us that Nissan is to be the first of the months of the year, Rav Kook demonstrates by recourse to numerous rabbinic sources too lengthy to copy here that Hashem is teaching Moshe about the need to conform the lunar calendar to the solar year, both for the purpose of having the holidays come “in their proper seasons,” and because of the wisdom of Astronomy that is not subject to the lunar orbit. This discipline of building calendars and coordinating between them, although nowadays most of us take it for granted, was one of the most technically complex and intellectually demanding practices of antiquity. In fact, most of the greatest mystics of the Middle Ages, whether renowned Jewish Sages or gentile magicians who built their reputation on adapting Jewish esoteric texts, all wrote treatises on the calendar to cement their reputations for posterity.

What Moshe understood in that fateful moment, immediately preceding the Exodus from Mitzrayim, was that this new destiny that was presaged by the rising moon of Aviv (lit. spring, which today we associate with Nissan) was something that would transform all of humanity through the agency of the Children of Israel. But it wasn’t going to be just the scholars or just the mystics or the farmers or the laborers who ushered in this new age of man. It was to be all of Israel – the nation, single and unified, but also each and every individual member of Israel, according to his or her abilities.