Things that Yoram knows: challah, candles and guillotines - alternative Shavuot

As we saw in the previous article, the week is universal, but throughout history there have been attempts to change the structure of the calendar that did not succeed. In this article we will explain why

Last week the section dealt with the wonderful globalization story of the week. He got lucky this week and the Roman Empire, just before it split, adopted him into its bosom. Islam carried the week culminating in "Yom Al Juma" to the regions of Asia and Africa, and astrology spread it to the Far East.

And yet it's hard not to be in awe of his continued success this week. When the week was adopted by Emperor Constantine's decree, the length was measured in "Zerots" and great distances in "stadiums", the weight in "ounces" and the hour was defined as the 12th part of the length of the day (long in June and short in December). All these measures disappeared and only this week not only survived but was even preserved when Pope Gregory XIII shook the calendar and brought October 13 to the next day, October 4, 1582. October 15th was Friday because yesterday (October 15th) was Thursday.

The week was preserved thanks to the religions that sought to maintain a sequence of holy days. From each Sabbath separates a whole number that is divisible by 7 from that first Sabbath in which "the Sabbath of God from all his work that he has done" and from each Sunday a whole number of weeks can be counted to the day of Christ's resurrection from his grave after the crucifixion. And yet at least three serious attempts to replace the week with more "sensible" time units were made and failed. In 1793, the French Republic replaced the Gregorian calendar with a "civil" calendar free of any religious or mythological affiliation. Each of the months of the year was exactly 30 days old and bears a name related to the season of the year. This column, for example, is published on the 23rd of the harvest month, Messidor year CCXXVIII, meaning the 228th year of the founding of the Republic. The other five (or six) days were holidays that were not included in the number of months. Each month is divided into 3 ten-day "minutes" (today is Tuesday in the third minute of the Messidur),

The day is divided into 10 hours, the hour into 100 minutes and the minute into 100 seconds. In a strange way, this innovative calendar, with its even months and ten-day week, is precisely similar to the ancient Egyptian calendar. It is even possible that our ancestors were familiar with "decades" long before the French: if we read the description of the flood literally, the rain begins on the seventeenth of the second month (Genesis 150, verse 150), lasts XNUMX days (verse XNUMX) and ends on the seventeenth of the seventh month (Chapter XNUMX verse XNUMX) We will see that before the writer there was a calendar in which five months last XNUMX days: an impossible combination in the Hebrew calendar and in any other lunar calendar but required according to the Egyptian calendar.

As we know, our ancestors preferred the seven-day week over it, and the fate of the revolutionary calendar in France was no different: it was finally abolished in 1805, but the ten-day week was already abolished in 1802. The obvious reason for renewing the covenant with the Catholic Church was also joined by more earthly reasons, although the minute "Makes sense" but reduces the number of rest days from a seventh to a tenth of the days. Another problem that sparked a long week is related to the absence of refrigerators in the 18th century. In the system of minutes, market days and fairs were held once every 10 days, the fruits bought on the market day simply did not last until the next market day. Thus, the French rationalists who gave us the meter for measuring distance and the kilogram for measuring mass failed in their attempt to bring scientific rationality to the dimension of time and had to leave us with the Babylonian division into 60 minutes per hour and with the Hebrew week.

The Soviet board

If this week's victory over those who rose up on it in France can be attributed to the church, then the failure of the second attempt to cancel the week: that of the Soviet government should be looked for elsewhere. In 1927, the week in the homeland of socialism was replaced by a five-day "Hamshua" to create a calendar in which each month contains 6 "Hamshuas" so that 12 months are 360 ​​days and the year is completed by 5 (or 6) holidays that are not in the number of months. Days that guaranteed workers about 1931 days of rest per year in the Holocaust to 61 in the bourgeois week. But, to the commissars' surprise, it turned out that the proletariat likes this week more than another 52 or 8 rest days a year. And so Stalin, who did not back down even from catastrophes such as agricultural collectivization, was forced to retreat and in 9 he was returned to the old Soviet Union.

It is interesting, by the way, to notice the common denominator for those who set days of rest and work. From Moses, who illustrated the laws of the Sabbath by stoning the "woodcutter", through Emperor Constantine, who suppressed rebellions with a strong hand and executed his son and his wife, the leaders of the French Revolution, who were known for their love of guillotines, to Stalin: changing schedules is not a job for vegetarians.

In the twentieth century, the last attempt was made to change the calendar. The League of Nations, the organization that preceded the United Nations and operated between the two world wars, discussed in the 365s a proposal for a calendar in which every day of the week is fixed. Most years contain 2021 days, a number that is not divisible by seven, so the tenth in July falls this year on a Friday, last year on a Wednesday, and in 30 it will fall on a Saturday. The birthday of each of us sometimes falls in the middle of the week and sometimes on the weekend, as does the day of the start of the school year or the beginning of the long holiday. If we make one day a year a "white day" that is not in the number of weeks and months: after December 364th there will be a "white day" (or "empty day") that will be celebrated all over the world as a day of rest. We will be left with 52 days which is exactly 10 weeks. In such a calendar each date will have a fixed day of the week (July 4 for example will always be a Tuesday) so we will no longer need calendars. The year will be divided into 13 quarters that are identical in length and in the number of work and rest days in them. Each quarter will begin on Sunday and end, 30 weeks later, on Saturday. The outrageous discrimination against the month of February will end and it will contain 30 days and in leap years an additional white day will be added after June XNUMX.

This is how Elisabeth Achelis, the living spirit behind the "world calendar" reasoned her opposition to the old calendar "the Gregorian calendar.. due to a complete lack of order and harmony. Days, dates, weeks, months and quarters wander aimlessly across the calendar. The days of the week and the dates are not coordinated, weeks enter and leave months unexpectedly, the first two quarters are too short and the last two are long. This impassioned speech is filled with admiration for the harmonious cycle of the movement of the celestial bodies and an aversion to the chaos of the human calendar. It must be understood against the background of the date it was adopted: April 1945. In a world that has never been further from "order and harmony" the calendar also appears to be a relic of an anti-rational culture that needs to be reorganized. The description of the "aimless" wandering weeks in the dimension of time echoes the suffering of millions who wandered in those days literally aimlessly in space.

Since the announcement of Nissan as the "head of months" on the day of the firstborn (Exodus 4), every change in the calendar has occurred following a crisis that destroyed existing systems. Thus during the time of Constantine in Rome, the French Revolution and the October Revolution in Russia. Similarly, the idea of ​​the "world calendar" flourished after the world wars but failed even before it was realized. Surprisingly, the fact that the new calendar brings 13 "unlucky days" (Fridays on the XNUMXth of the month) every year was not a consideration in the debate. The "White Day" initiative She didn't manage to fix the year, but in the blink of an eye she managed to unite rabbis, priests and imams in opposition to the idea that would have severed the Jewish Sabbath, the Christian Dies Domini and the Muslim Friday from the Sabbath, Sunday and Friday of the general calendar.

Top attorney Alan Dershovich, who led to the acquittal of OJ Simpson and many of Benjamin Netanyahu's supporters in the legal community, recounts in his memoirs that his first public activity as an Orthodox Jewish high school student in Brooklyn was organizing an interfaith petition against the "World Week" initiative, which was indeed finally shelved by the Economic Council - United Nations in 1956. On the Jewish side, the opposition to the reform was led by the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain (and of the British Empire) Yosef Zvi Hertz. For the first time in Jewish history, the calendar and Shabbat were a unifying and not divisive factor among the Jews. Orthodox and Reformed, Zionists and anti-Zionists fought together for reform, the leader of the Reform movement in the USA, Stephen Wise, stated to members of Congress "Even if there are only a thousand Jews in the world for whom the Sabbath is holy, we will go through fire and water to protect their religious freedom." Supporters of the reform pointed out that even in the old calendar a Jew who crossed the international date line could experience a week of 6 or 8 days and even quoted the Sage's article in the treatise Yoma about the Sabbath "it is in your hands and you are not in hers". The poet Leah Goldberg did not get carried away in the angry struggle and gave those days outside the normal time order Poetic meaning in the song "White Days" .

The week is a victory of the human creation, messy and chaotic, over nature, which imposes on us the day, the month and the year, and even on the multiplication table, which draws us to divide time into easy-to-divide units like 24 or 60. Seven is a prime number, uncomfortable, not "natural" and not compatible with the decimal system, It's there because that's what humans wanted: not celestial beings and not mathematicians.

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