(no subject)
Feb. 13th, 2018 12:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretDouglas Adams wrote that "Time is an illusion; Lunchtime doubly so."
Much of our timekeeping system is arbitrary or at best semi-arbitrary. The Earth revolves around the sun once in the time it takes the Earth to rotate on its axis a little more than 365 times. We use adaptations of these periods, modified for convenience, as key timekeeping numbers, and then we subdivide them more or less arbitrarily in ways that are, again, mostly a convenience. 7 days in a week, why? According to the Bible, because God Created the World in six days and rested on the 7th. Nobody else seems to have a better explanation for why.
My question of the day is, in terms of this conception of time, how do we understand the nature of the Sabbath? Is it an arbitrary relative date, one out of seven days designated as a day of rest? Or is it an absolute fixture, a metaphysical firmament echoing out of Creation?
This is a big question you can look at in a lot of different ways. One of the important ones for me is that I have a somewhat heterodox intuition about the nature of Creation. I don't fully buy, say, Schroeder's Cosmic Background Radiation clock explanation of the Seven Days, but I do think that in some way the seven days of Creation do not represent seven rotations of the Earth on its axis. Among other reasons, because the Earth wasn't created until after the first day of Creation, so it would make no sense to use its rotation as a timer. For this reason, I'm less attracted to absolutist theories of Shabbat as the actual anniversary of God's rest from creation. It doesn't make sense to me that if the days of the week are in some fashion metaphors/stand-ins for the days of creation, there would be some necessary one to one mapping that we're obligated to stick with. Rather, it should be seen as a symbol of Creation- because God created the universe in seven days, we observe our own, human measured seven day cycle.
We wrestled with evidence that Mesorah considers Shabbat an absolute, though, in a shiur I attended recently. The topic was the so-called Halachic dateline. This is the necessary equivalent to the civil International Dateline for purposes of the Jewish calendar. On one side of the dateline it's Shabbos, on the other side it's Chol. There are a couple of competing Rishonic and Acharonic constructions of the halachic dateline, all in some way based on Jerusalem's location, but my basic impulse against an absolutist Shabbos begs the question: why do we need one at all? We have a civil dateline, a lot of countries legislate their timekeeping, unless we have some reason to subscribe to an absolute idea of Shabbos, there's no clear reason why we would observe some other accounting of the days. You might object that since the Hebrew calendar is a Torah obligation, timekeeping is not part of the din of nations, but there's a clear mitzvah of Rosh Chodesh in setting the months, which is not evident with regards to Shabbat. The mitzvah of Shabbos just says count six days and observe the seventh. It's crazy to me to say that in Japan you observe Shabbat on civil Sunday and in New York you observe it on civil Saturday, because we draw the dateline differently than the goyim. Nonetheless, most poskim say this is what we do, though they disagree about the exact dateline and which countries are affected. (Because of the machloket, some Jews living in the affected Pacific Rim countries observe a full Shabbos on one of the day of the majority opinion and observe some of the mitzvot of Shabbos on the day of the minority opinion.)
In discussion of what this means, I mention a Gemara in Shabbos 69b that I've apparently been misconstruing since I learned it. Rav Huna says that if we construct a situation where a person is alone and lost and has lost track of the days of the week so that they don't know when Shabbos is, the rule is that they count six days from the day they realize they've lost track, and then observe the seventh day as Shabbos.
That seems to suggest that Shabbos is arbitrary and exists relative to the six days of work. If you've lost track of the count others are making of Shabbos, you start your own count by designating a personal Shabbos. Which makes sense per the p'shat of the mitzvah. "Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work; but the seventh day is a sabbath unto the LORD thy God." Relative, right?
But that's not the end of the discussion. Rava then offers further detail, or perhaps a competing theory, that I'd glossed over previously. Rava says that even though you observe the seventh day with Kiddush and Havdalah, you treat all seven days as if they could potentially be Shabbos and only do the minimum amount of work required to stay alive. That approach only makes sense if the Shabbos date you've lost track of still has hold over you in spite of your designation of a new Shabbos, which would imply an absolute Shabbos. Why would you then count out and designate a new Shabbos? Maybe to be a remembrance rather than a true observance, so that even though you're enacting this weird existence where every day is a potential Shabbos, you remember that there really is a true Shabbos that happens once a week.
How do we understand Rava's position?
Maybe Rava and Rav Huna are in disagreement. Maybe Rav Huna thinks Shabbos is relative, Rava thinks it's absolute, and so Rava is trying to save this strange-to-him halacha within an absolute schema by saying, okay, the halacha is that they create their own Shabbat, but it's still not *really* Shabbat.
Maybe Rav Huna and Rava are in agreement that Shabbos is absolute, and Rava is just providing additional detail and clarity on Rav Huna's position. [I think this seems to be the Gemara's most straightforward take, though I don't like it.]
Or maybe we can save Rava's position within a relative Shabbos framework. Perhaps both hold that Shabbos is relative, but Rava thinks it's communally relative, you're still beholden to the relative date that your home community observes. And so both your home community's Shabbos and your new designated Shabbos have kedusha to them, and even though you've designated a new Shabbos that is *real* on its own terms, you still have to act as if you're potentially violating the Shabbos of your larger community. How might we test this theory? What if ten Jews were lost in a desert and lost track of Shabbos? Or what if a group including a Beis Din with smicha was lost in the desert? If they were Shabbos absolutists, it wouldn't matter, they would act as per Rava. But if they were communitarian relativists, this might constitute enough of a community to properly designate a new day as Shabbos and not worry about Shabbos back home.
In practice, how will we determine the answer? Perhaps, I think, when we send Jews to Mars. Earth Shabbos will lose any potential physical meaning, as the Martian day slips with relation to the Earth day. So if the absolutists win, Shabbos on Mars will be pegged to Earth Shabbos and not to the cycle of sundown to sundown. If the relativists win, Martian Shabbos will be its own beast, maybe counted from the first day Jews land on Mars. But either way, the current workarounds present problems that would need to be resolved.
It also occurs to me that I may be ascribing too much import in my idea of an 'absolute' Shabbat to its connection to Creation. Shabbat is both a commemoration of Creation and a commemoration of the Exodus from Egypt, so the 'absolute' camp may not be deriving anything about the anniversary of the days of Creation. They may just hold that Shabbat was given as a Mitzvah to Israel upon the departure from Egypt and the formal count of six days and then the seventh which derives from that initial beginning is inviolate and thus effectively absolute.
I'm more sympathetic to this theory than I am to a Creation-based theory of Shabbat's absolute timing, but I still think the conclusions it leads to with regard to the civil dateline create needless complication. As long as someone is working six days and resting on the seventh, and as long as they are doing so in coordination with their Jewish community and not adding their own needless complication by observing their own arbitrary calendar, I don't see the necessity for holding by some theoretical correct time in which Shabbat occurs. But this position appears to go against normative halacha, so there must be some argument I've not come across yet that wins out.
Much of our timekeeping system is arbitrary or at best semi-arbitrary. The Earth revolves around the sun once in the time it takes the Earth to rotate on its axis a little more than 365 times. We use adaptations of these periods, modified for convenience, as key timekeeping numbers, and then we subdivide them more or less arbitrarily in ways that are, again, mostly a convenience. 7 days in a week, why? According to the Bible, because God Created the World in six days and rested on the 7th. Nobody else seems to have a better explanation for why.
My question of the day is, in terms of this conception of time, how do we understand the nature of the Sabbath? Is it an arbitrary relative date, one out of seven days designated as a day of rest? Or is it an absolute fixture, a metaphysical firmament echoing out of Creation?
This is a big question you can look at in a lot of different ways. One of the important ones for me is that I have a somewhat heterodox intuition about the nature of Creation. I don't fully buy, say, Schroeder's Cosmic Background Radiation clock explanation of the Seven Days, but I do think that in some way the seven days of Creation do not represent seven rotations of the Earth on its axis. Among other reasons, because the Earth wasn't created until after the first day of Creation, so it would make no sense to use its rotation as a timer. For this reason, I'm less attracted to absolutist theories of Shabbat as the actual anniversary of God's rest from creation. It doesn't make sense to me that if the days of the week are in some fashion metaphors/stand-ins for the days of creation, there would be some necessary one to one mapping that we're obligated to stick with. Rather, it should be seen as a symbol of Creation- because God created the universe in seven days, we observe our own, human measured seven day cycle.
We wrestled with evidence that Mesorah considers Shabbat an absolute, though, in a shiur I attended recently. The topic was the so-called Halachic dateline. This is the necessary equivalent to the civil International Dateline for purposes of the Jewish calendar. On one side of the dateline it's Shabbos, on the other side it's Chol. There are a couple of competing Rishonic and Acharonic constructions of the halachic dateline, all in some way based on Jerusalem's location, but my basic impulse against an absolutist Shabbos begs the question: why do we need one at all? We have a civil dateline, a lot of countries legislate their timekeeping, unless we have some reason to subscribe to an absolute idea of Shabbos, there's no clear reason why we would observe some other accounting of the days. You might object that since the Hebrew calendar is a Torah obligation, timekeeping is not part of the din of nations, but there's a clear mitzvah of Rosh Chodesh in setting the months, which is not evident with regards to Shabbat. The mitzvah of Shabbos just says count six days and observe the seventh. It's crazy to me to say that in Japan you observe Shabbat on civil Sunday and in New York you observe it on civil Saturday, because we draw the dateline differently than the goyim. Nonetheless, most poskim say this is what we do, though they disagree about the exact dateline and which countries are affected. (Because of the machloket, some Jews living in the affected Pacific Rim countries observe a full Shabbos on one of the day of the majority opinion and observe some of the mitzvot of Shabbos on the day of the minority opinion.)
In discussion of what this means, I mention a Gemara in Shabbos 69b that I've apparently been misconstruing since I learned it. Rav Huna says that if we construct a situation where a person is alone and lost and has lost track of the days of the week so that they don't know when Shabbos is, the rule is that they count six days from the day they realize they've lost track, and then observe the seventh day as Shabbos.
That seems to suggest that Shabbos is arbitrary and exists relative to the six days of work. If you've lost track of the count others are making of Shabbos, you start your own count by designating a personal Shabbos. Which makes sense per the p'shat of the mitzvah. "Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work; but the seventh day is a sabbath unto the LORD thy God." Relative, right?
But that's not the end of the discussion. Rava then offers further detail, or perhaps a competing theory, that I'd glossed over previously. Rava says that even though you observe the seventh day with Kiddush and Havdalah, you treat all seven days as if they could potentially be Shabbos and only do the minimum amount of work required to stay alive. That approach only makes sense if the Shabbos date you've lost track of still has hold over you in spite of your designation of a new Shabbos, which would imply an absolute Shabbos. Why would you then count out and designate a new Shabbos? Maybe to be a remembrance rather than a true observance, so that even though you're enacting this weird existence where every day is a potential Shabbos, you remember that there really is a true Shabbos that happens once a week.
How do we understand Rava's position?
Maybe Rava and Rav Huna are in disagreement. Maybe Rav Huna thinks Shabbos is relative, Rava thinks it's absolute, and so Rava is trying to save this strange-to-him halacha within an absolute schema by saying, okay, the halacha is that they create their own Shabbat, but it's still not *really* Shabbat.
Maybe Rav Huna and Rava are in agreement that Shabbos is absolute, and Rava is just providing additional detail and clarity on Rav Huna's position. [I think this seems to be the Gemara's most straightforward take, though I don't like it.]
Or maybe we can save Rava's position within a relative Shabbos framework. Perhaps both hold that Shabbos is relative, but Rava thinks it's communally relative, you're still beholden to the relative date that your home community observes. And so both your home community's Shabbos and your new designated Shabbos have kedusha to them, and even though you've designated a new Shabbos that is *real* on its own terms, you still have to act as if you're potentially violating the Shabbos of your larger community. How might we test this theory? What if ten Jews were lost in a desert and lost track of Shabbos? Or what if a group including a Beis Din with smicha was lost in the desert? If they were Shabbos absolutists, it wouldn't matter, they would act as per Rava. But if they were communitarian relativists, this might constitute enough of a community to properly designate a new day as Shabbos and not worry about Shabbos back home.
In practice, how will we determine the answer? Perhaps, I think, when we send Jews to Mars. Earth Shabbos will lose any potential physical meaning, as the Martian day slips with relation to the Earth day. So if the absolutists win, Shabbos on Mars will be pegged to Earth Shabbos and not to the cycle of sundown to sundown. If the relativists win, Martian Shabbos will be its own beast, maybe counted from the first day Jews land on Mars. But either way, the current workarounds present problems that would need to be resolved.
It also occurs to me that I may be ascribing too much import in my idea of an 'absolute' Shabbat to its connection to Creation. Shabbat is both a commemoration of Creation and a commemoration of the Exodus from Egypt, so the 'absolute' camp may not be deriving anything about the anniversary of the days of Creation. They may just hold that Shabbat was given as a Mitzvah to Israel upon the departure from Egypt and the formal count of six days and then the seventh which derives from that initial beginning is inviolate and thus effectively absolute.
I'm more sympathetic to this theory than I am to a Creation-based theory of Shabbat's absolute timing, but I still think the conclusions it leads to with regard to the civil dateline create needless complication. As long as someone is working six days and resting on the seventh, and as long as they are doing so in coordination with their Jewish community and not adding their own needless complication by observing their own arbitrary calendar, I don't see the necessity for holding by some theoretical correct time in which Shabbat occurs. But this position appears to go against normative halacha, so there must be some argument I've not come across yet that wins out.