The Calendar
In five places, the Torah lists the festivals of the Jewish year. Two of these, Exodus 23:14–17 and 34:18–26, are brief. Three, in Leviticus, Numbers 28–29, and Deuteronomy 16:1–17, are set out at length, and they are very different from one another. The list in Numbers sets out the precise specification of the sacrifices to be offered on each of the holy days. The account in Deuteronomy looks at the social impact of the festivals when Israel became a nation in its own land. It emphasises the importance of these days for collective celebration: “You, your sons and daughters, your male and female servants, and the Levites, the foreigners, the fatherless, and the widows who live in your towns.”
The accounts in Numbers and Deuteronomy each have a clearly defined focus. This is harder to see when it comes to the list in this parasha. It mentions some of the offerings but not others. It lacks a social dimension. It gives some details we do not find elsewhere, such as the commands to live in booths and take the “four kinds” on Sukkot. It goes into greater detail about the counting of days and weeks from the offering of the Omer to the festival of Shavuot. But it seems to lack a clear theme. The sages say that it comes to tell us the “order” (sidran) of the festivals,1Sifre, Parashat Re’eh, 127. but so, in a way, do the other accounts. They list the days in sequence and give their dates. Evidently the sages mean something deeper by “order,” but what is it?
In one respect in particular, the Leviticus account is quite strange – in its treatment of Shabbat. Here is how the chapter begins:
The Lord said to Moses, “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘These are the appointed festivals [mo’adei] of the Lord, which you are to proclaim [tikre’u] as sacred assemblies [mikra’ei kodesh]: these are My appointed festivals. Six days shall work be done, but the seventh day is a day of sabbath rest, a day of sacred assembly. You shall do no work; wherever you live, it is a sabbath to the Lord. These are the appointed festivals of the Lord, the sacred assemblies you are to proclaim at their appointed times.’” (Lev. 23:1–4)
It then continues with the details of the festivals. The problem is glaring and was noted by the commentators. Two terms are used here in connection with Shabbat that are not used elsewhere: mo’ed, “appointed festival,” and mikra kodesh, “sacred assembly.” But neither fits Shabbat. It is not a mo’ed in the sense of a day with a date on the calendar.2See Sifra and Rashi to Leviticus 23:2.
The Hebrew calendar is both lunar and solar, lunar in respect of months, solar in relation to the seasons of the year. Shabbat is neither. It creates its own unique rhythm, the seven-day week, which did not exist in any other ancient system of counting time. The very institution of the seven-day week, now a global phenomenon, has its origin in the Hebrew Bible. So Shabbat is not a fixed date on the calendar. It is not a mo’ed.
Nor is it a mikra kodesh. The commentators give two explanations of this phrase. One is “sacred assembly,” meaning a time when the nation gathered in a central sanctuary (Nahmanides). But this does not apply to Shabbat. It was celebrated locally, not centrally. The other is “a day proclaimed holy” (Rashi, Rashbam), referring to the fact that the calendar depended on the proclamation of the Beit Din as to which day or days were announced as Rosh Ḥodesh, the start of the new month. It is precisely in this respect that Shabbat differs from the festivals. It is not dependent on any human proclamation. Shabbat is holy because God Himself sanctified it on the seventh day of creation.
So Shabbat does not belong in a list of the festivals. The text seems to be aware of this because after the introduction, “These are the appointed festivals of the Lord,” and the one-line account of Shabbat, it goes on to repeat the introduction, in almost the same words, and then lists the festivals themselves. Near the end of the chapter, there is another indication that Shabbat does not fully fit. The text states: “These are the Lord’s appointed festivals, which you are to proclaim as sacred assemblies for bringing food offerings to the Lord…in addition to those for the Lord’s Sabbaths.” So what is Shabbat doing here? It seems both to belong and not to belong.
The problem is made more acute because of a phrase to be found three times in this chapter and nowhere else in the whole of Tanakh: “which you are to proclaim [tikre’u].” It was this phrase with its threefold emphasis that led the sages to conclude that the holiness of the holy days depends entirely on the determination of the Beit Din.3See Mishna Rosh HaShana 2:9.
In relation to the calendar, the verdict of the court is constitutive, not regulative. When a court declares a man guilty, it may be right or it may be wrong. But when it declares a certain day Rosh Ḥodesh, the day of the new moon, it cannot be wrong because its declaration makes it so. So it is all the more strange that Shabbat makes an appearance in this chapter, because the court has no role whatsoever to play in the determination of Shabbat. No ruling of any court can turn a weekday into Shabbat or Shabbat into a weekday.
These are problems that cannot be solved fully by focusing on the subject at hand, namely the calendar. We have before us a classic instance where the meaning of a text is to be found by stepping back and seeing its place in the biblical narrative as a whole.
The subject of the second half of the book of Leviticus is holiness. This is a concept we readily understand in connection with God. It means that God is radically distinct from anything in the physical universe. He is not bounded by time or space. He cannot be represented by any icon. To make an image of God is to take the first step to idolatry. God is not a force of nature but the creator of nature itself. That was the real revolution of monotheism: not reducing the number of gods from many to one, but rather understanding that God transcends the universe. He is One, unique, alone. That is what holiness means: radical difference from anything within the human world.
That is what makes the command in Leviticus 19:2 so paradoxical: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” How can human beings be holy, if holiness is precisely what makes God utterly different from us? There are two answers to this question, one before and one after the sin of the Golden Calf.
The first answer is contained in a verse that appears immediately before the revelation at Mount Sinai and the giving of the Ten Commandments. God tells Moses to say to the Israelites: “You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Myself. Now if you obey Me fully and keep My covenant, then out of all nations you will be My treasured possession. Although the whole earth is Mine, you will be for Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” The emphasis here is on covenant. The Israelites will be unique because they will have God as their king, their sovereign, their lawmaker. They will serve Him and He will protect them. They will be God’s people. They will be a holy nation in the sense of being the nation of the holy God. This is holiness by association. God is holy. We are His. Therefore we are holy.
After the sin of the Golden Calf, however, the arc of Israel’s destiny changes. A new tone enters the narrative. We sense it immediately with the construction of the Sanctuary in the last third of the book of Exodus. It dominates the entire book of Leviticus. Now the emphasis is less on God, the worker of wonders, the ruler, the sovereign, the hand that changes history, and the voice that shakes the world. Instead, the focus is on the Israelites and the space they create for God to become a permanent presence in their midst. The focus shifts from what God does to what we do.
Holiness has suddenly come close, and the centre of action has shifted from heaven to earth. The Israelites are no longer to be holy merely by association as the “treasured possession” of God. Holiness in the sense of an encounter with God is to become a regular feature of their lives. The rabbis beautifully expressed this new dimension in the blessing they attributed to Moses when the people completed the Sanctuary: “May it be God’s will that His presence rests in the work of your hands.” That is holiness by action: living in such a way that God’s presence lives in what we do.
The pattern is set by the Sanctuary itself. As we noted elsewhere,4Covenant and Conversation: Exodus – The Book of Redemption, 329–337. the language the Torah uses at the end of Exodus as the work reaches completion deliberately evokes the language the Torah uses of God on the seventh day of creation in Genesis 2:1–3. The Sanctuary is, in other words, a microcosmos, a universe in miniature, made by human beings at God’s request so that they can create as He creates – while remembering that He is our creator. The Sanctuary represents the order we create to mirror the order God creates, thus becoming, in the rabbinic phrase, “God’s partner in the work of creation.”
What Leviticus 23 is telling us is that what the Sanctuary was in relation to place, the calendar is in relation to time: it is the holy time we create to mirror the holy time God creates. The holy time God creates is Shabbat. This is the first thing God declares holy (Gen. 2:3), the only time the word “holy” appears in the book of Genesis. That is why the list of festivals in Leviticus begins with Shabbat, just as the construction of the Tabernacle begins with Shabbat (Ex. 35:2–3). It is to remind us that our creation must mirror and serve as a permanent reminder of God’s creation.
How do the festivals mirror Shabbat? The answer lies in the single most distinctive feature of the list in Leviticus: the number seven. There are seven holy days enumerated in Leviticus 23: Pesaḥ (14 Nisan), Ḥag HaMatzot, Shavuot, Rosh HaShana, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, and Shemini Atzeret. There are seven days on which “regular work” (melekhet avoda) is forbidden.5Subtracting Pesaḥ (14 Nisan) from the previous list, because it is not a day on which work is forbidden by the Torah, and adding the seventh day of Ḥag HaMatzot.
The two extended festivals, Ḥag HaMatzot and Sukkot, are both seven days long. Shavuot is celebrated seven weeks of seven days after the offering of the Omer. The largest cluster of festivals is in the seventh month. The passage as a whole contains seven paragraphs. There are seven instances of words that appear only in this chapter and not elsewhere in the Torah (tikre’u, three times and mo’adei or mo’adai, four times). And what we find in Leviticus 23 in relation to days, weeks, and months, we find in Leviticus 25 in relation to years: an entire structure of social legislation built around the number seven in the form of the sabbatical and Jubilee years.
Seven is the number of holiness, because God Himself declared the seventh day holy. It is also holy because the seven-day week corresponds to nothing in nature. It is the day that points to the One who transcends nature and created nature. So Leviticus 23 is revolutionary in two ways. First, it takes the number associated with non-natural time and transposes it into natural time: the calendar of lunar months and solar years. Second, it emphasises the human contribution to the sanctification of time by insisting three times that these are sacred days “which you are to proclaim.” It takes the principle of Leviticus 19:2 – “You shall be holy because I the Lord your God am holy” – and applies it to time. You shall make time holy because I make time holy, says God. Thus the calendar does for time what the Sanctuary did for place.6Abraham Joshua Heschel famously spoke of the Sabbath as a sanctuary in time. My argument is that this is not the right analogy. It is the festivals that are the sanctuary in time because they, like the Sanctuary, are brought into being by human acts.
It allowed the Israelites to create a mirror of what God had created when He made the universe.
There is a word that connects the festivals and the Sanctuary: mo’ed. It describes the festivals and it is also used – in the very first verse of Leviticus – of the Ohel Mo’ed, the “Tent of Meeting” within the Sanctuary. Thus mo’ed in Leviticus means not just “an appointed time” but also any time or place designated as a meeting point between man and God. Only in this sense is Shabbat, like the festivals, a mo’ed. Holy times are times when, setting aside our daily devices and desires, we have a tryst, a lover’s meeting, with God, whether at His initiative or ours.
No sooner have we made the connection between the word mo’ed in our chapter and in the opening line of the book than we sense another stroke of intertextuality: the word Vayikra itself. This, the opening word of the book, is echoed in our chapter fifteen times in the phrases mikra kodesh, “a sacred assembly,” and asher tikre’u otam, “which you shall proclaim.” Leviticus opens by God calling to man. It reaches its culmination here by man calling to God.
Leviticus 23 can only be understood in terms of the larger drama set in motion by the sin of the Golden Calf. It became clear at that point that if the Israelites were to grow to maturity, they had to become more than the passive beneficiaries of God’s goodness. They had to become, under His direction, active creators of spaces that would become filled by His presence. Whether in place or time, in social structures or private lives, from the way they ate to the way they conducted their most intimate relations, they had to introduce that which is beyond nature into a life lived within the realities of nature. That is holiness by human action, making space for God.
Leviticus 23 takes this idea and applies it to time. On Shabbat, God issues the invitation. On the festivals, we do. Both are forms of mo’ed in the sense of meeting. The calendar is where Vayikra, the call of God, meets tikre’u, the call of man.