Q&A: A Question on the Talmud in Rosh Hashanah
A Question on the Talmud in Rosh Hashanah
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I had trouble understanding this Talmudic passage; if you could explain it to me:
Rosh Hashanah 7a:
Our Rabbis taught: On the first of Nisan is the New Year for months. From where do we know this? As it is written (Exodus 12:2): “This month shall be for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first for you of the months of the year. Speak to all the congregation of Israel, saying: On the tenth of this month they shall each take for themselves a lamb according to their fathers’ houses, a lamb for each household. And it shall be kept by you until the fourteenth day of this month, and they shall slaughter it,” etc. And it is written (Deuteronomy 16:1): “Observe the month of springtime.” Which is the month that has springtime in it? You must say: this is Nisan—and it calls it the first. But perhaps it is Iyar? We require springtime, and that is not present. But perhaps Adar? We require most of springtime, and that is not present. Is “most of springtime” actually written?! In the end, the Talmud learns this from verses in the Prophets.
I don’t understand the question, “But perhaps it is Iyar?” We have a tradition that Passover is celebrated in the month of Nisan, so that is the first month! And if you say that this tradition is not being relied on, then later there the Talmud assumes that we know the order of the months—Tishrei, Cheshvan, Kislev, etc.—as Tosafot writes there. And if the point of the question is who says this month is called Nisan, then that is just semantics of naming, so what is the difficulty?
In short, I came away a bit confused by this passage. I’d be glad if the Rabbi could explain it step by step.
Answer
It is the way of the Talmud to look for a source even for things it already knows.
What is more, when they first decided to observe Passover in Nisan (the Passover of later generations, not the Passover in Egypt), how did they know that? Once they decided, it was passed down to us by tradition. But there is still room for the question of how they knew it in the first place.
Something similar appears with “And you shall count for yourselves from the morrow after the Sabbath”—meaning the day after Passover. Everyone knew that this meant the day after Passover, since they had already counted the Omer from Sinai onward. Still, they wanted to clarify the words of the Torah.
And furthermore, sometimes the Talmud is actually trying to derive the opposite from here: the verse teaches me that the month of Nisan is the first. After all, we know that Passover is celebrated in Nisan, and the Torah calls it the first month; from here we learn that Nisan is the first month of the year (and as is well known, the tannaim disagreed about this—whether Tishrei or Nisan is first).