Sun day

[rhu]

As some of you are aware, this Wednesday morning, in addition to being the eve of Passover, is the once-every-28-years Jewish ritual of the Blessing Regarding the Sun. I've been giving a bit of thought to how I feel about this.

The astronomy on which it's based was the state of the art 2,000 years ago. Assuming a geocentric model, and a year length of 365.25 days, then one computes that the sun's position in the sky relative to a seven-day week has a 28-year cycle. So on the first Wednesday following the vernal equinox in years whose number is 28n+1, the sun is starting a new cycle.

To us, of course, this is wrong on many points. The solar year is not quite 365.25 days long, which affects both the cycle length and the Julian/Gregorian drift. The sun is not 5,769 years old. The solar system is moving through the Milky Way, which is itself speeding through the Universe. And so on, and so forth.

But I don't think that matters. Here's why.

The actual blessing that is recited has nothing to do with the sun. This is simply one of several occasions when one acknowledges the Creator by reciting "Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Infinite Sovereign, Who creates the creations of Genesis." Other such occasions are upon witnessing phenomena such as shooting stars or lunar and solar eclipses, or geologic wonders such as the Grand Canyon. Basically, when one is aware in the moment of the grandeur of creation, that is an opportunity to give credit to the Creator.

This is not a blessing of thanksgiving; it is not a blessing of benefit; it is a blessing of acknowledgment. And it is not a blessing on the sun; nor a blessing of the sun; nor a blessing for the sun. It is a blessing occasioned by the sun's putative return to its position at the moment it was created.

And that's why I don't think the faulty astronomy matters. The moment has potency because of the social construct that says "this is the moment to think about the fact that the sun was created at all."

The part that I do have a problem with is the accretion of ritual. The Talmud says that when the sun returns to the start of its cycle, we make the blessing "Who creates the creations of Genesis." And the Talmud then continues its list of similar occasions.

But this only happens once every 28 years. And it's nine words long. It's over in two seconds. That feels anticlimactic to people. So they augment it.

They add the Torah passage that describes the fourth day of creation. They add chapters of Psalms. They add most of the liturgical poem Kel Adon, which we sing every Shabbat morning, describing how the heavenly bodies praise God.

I think part of why the rabbis of the Talmud included this as just another occasion for "oseh maaseh vreishit" is because they didn't want it to be a big deal. This is not a time for sun-fetishism. Look, guys, (they seem to say) the return of the sun to the start of its cycle is just another part of nature.

I'd feel this way even if this time around it didn't happen to fall on Erev Pesach, a day when we're already ridiculously busy.

The irony of the juxtaposition is delicious, I'll admit --- on a day when we literally are watching seconds tick by to the moment when we are no longer allowed to eat chametz, and then to the moment when we are no longer allowed to own it, and then to the moment when we may begin our seder, and then to the moment of "halfway through the night" when the redemption took place --- when we count the eighteen minutes allowed between the introduction of flour and water into the same room until the matzot are fully baked and removed from the oven --- on the day of seconds, minutes, and hours, we are looking to heavenly cycles of 28 years.

So yes, on Wednesday morning I will hope for clear skies so I can spend two seconds contemplating eternity --- but I will not make any bigger a deal about it than I did when I said the same blessing over the glacial valley at Franconia Notch State Park, or during last week's thunderstorm.

Comments

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

It reminds me of when Nomi and I went to see the Transit of Venus in 2004. That was also a time for that blessing.

[cellio]

I've been considering how to observe this moment (the first time it's been relevant in my life), and have also been bothered by some of the acretions. (Like you, I'm not bothered by the astronomy. We celebrate lots of things that might not be literally true (e.g. on Rosh Hashana we declare the age of the world); "as if it were" is still a powerful concept.)

Thanks for laying this out. It moved my vague feelings to something a little more coherent.

(Tangent: If one is watching an eclipse happen, at one point are you supposed to make the b'racha? Immediately on start, or do you wait for the full eclipse if you intend to stay out and watch?)

[lucretia-borgia.livejournal.com]

Dunno if you've seen this: http://www.aishdas.org/asp/2009/03/halakhah-phenomenology-1.shtml from "Aspaqlaria," but if you haven't it's worth a quick read (as all his stuff tends to be). (And often, a slow, thoughtful, read.)

And it's nine words long. It's over in two seconds. That feels anticlimactic to people. So they augment it.

I have to admit that's the root of my discomfort with many, many rituals, from the addition of "hinei menuchan umzuman" and similar "oh, look, I'm gonna do a mitzvah" verbiage, to the accretions to kiddush lavanah, tashlikh, and, heck, let's say it: the liturgy itself. Piyutim. And oh G-d, MORE piyutim. The message seems to be, "don't bother actually thinking (or worse, feeling) what you're doing and Who you're addressing, just babblebabblebabble some more. No, really, it has religious value. It's in Hebrew, after all. Or even better, Aramaic."

But maybe that's just coming from a sneaky suspicion that birkhat ha-chama is there just to make the book publishers some money. :->

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

I once heard someone decry the hineni muchan on the grounds that it gives the Satan an opportunity to interfere with one's performance of the mitzvah. Better, he claimed, to surprise the Satan by performing a mitzvah without any forewarning.

I was amused by that.

[lucretia-borgia.livejournal.com]

hineni muchan

Now, see, if you use my (ahem) nussach, Satan'll be so busy trying to figure out what the Hell you're saying that he won't have a chance to interfere. Which is the advantage to doing things from phonetic memory rather than looking them up. :->

[autotruezone.livejournal.com]

On the whole, I agree about the accretion of tefilot making it harder to concentrate on what one is saying -- that one tends to focus on getting all those words said rather than actually saying them with kavana.

However, I don't agree that this applies to hineni muchan. It seems to me that the whole purpose of hineni muchan is to focus onesself on the words that are to follow -- to prepare onesself to daven with kavana.

[abbasegal.livejournal.com]

Actually, 365.25 wasn't even state of the art 2000 years ago -- Rav Adda used 365.24862 (which is closer today's state of the art of 365.24219).

I heard a shiur from a neighbor, Rav Mois Navon (a paper version of it is available at http://www.divreinavon.com/pdf/BirkatHahama.pdf), where he discusses this discrepency. He also points out a much bigger discrepancy -- how can the world have been created at the vernal equinox when we also hold that it was created at Rosh Hashana?

His take is that the Rabbis deliberately chose the less accurate version of the time because the natural phenomena are less important than our acknowledgment that God controls the universe, regardless of man's participation -- not far from your point, though his paper is worth reading to see his treatment.

[autotruezone.livejournal.com]

Do you have a source for saying the bracha over eclipses? A couple of lunar eclipses ago, I asked a rav. He checked a couple of sources that listed events for which you say a bracha, and eclipses weren't on the lists. We agreed that lunar eclipses are common enough events (and more common than some of the items on the list) that if you should say the bracha over eclipses, then eclipses would have been on the lists.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

When I asked my Rav, he said that even though eclipses are not in the Talmud's list, if one's personal response to seeing an eclipse is to be in awe of the act of creation, then making the bracha is an appropriate response.

[autotruezone.livejournal.com]

That makes sense.

In thinking about the omission, I began to wonder whether the reason for not saying the bracha over eclipses might have something to do with the fact that the moon is often linked to Bnai Yisrael in Jewish literature and poetry. So perhaps if one thinks in that metaphor, then the eclipsing of the moon would not be seen as a good thing.

I don't know whether that's anyone else's reason for it being omitted, but it makes a certain amount of sense to me.