Q&A: Calculation of the Month, the Beginning of the Day, and Hanukkah Candles
Calculation of the Month, the Beginning of the Day, and Hanukkah Candles
Question
Hello Rabbi,
Recently a guy named Ronen Cohen has been uploading videos to YouTube in which he claims that the words of the Sages are nonsense, and he attacks the whole idea of the Oral Torah. He says he is not Karaite, because they accepted our calendar and he did not, but his method is Karaite because, according to him, he sticks to the written text.
He claims that our calculation of the month is mistaken because we go by the moon, and therefore all the festivals we celebrate are not at their proper time.
He claims that the Sabbath is observed starting from Sabbath morning, because according to the Torah a day begins in the morning.
About Hanukkah candles, he claims that the blessing “who sanctified us with His commandments” is a lie because it is a rabbinic commandment, and that maybe we should say “who commanded us through our Sages.” He presents this as if we are attributing divinity to the Sages, like Christianity does.
I would be glad to hear your response.
Thank you very much.
Answer
I don’t really have anything to respond to, because you’ve presented assertions here, not arguments. This is a collection of many questions. If there is something concrete, bring it up here and we can discuss it. Of course, these things depend on your trust in the tradition of the Oral Torah. If you examine things according to the plain meaning of the Torah, then clearly the Sages departed from it in quite a few cases.
Discussion on Answer
I didn’t understand the claim. First, the order in which things are written in the Torah does not necessarily indicate the chronological order. Second, you yourself bring the fact that in the Torah itself (“and there was evening…”) there is an opposite indication, so why did you decide in favor of the first source? And third, as is well known from the commentators regarding sacrificial matters, there the night does indeed follow the day, and only in the rest of the Torah does the day follow the night. There is a hint to this at the beginning of tractate Berakhot, where they explicitly discuss the question of what follows what.
More explicitly, see for example Mishnah Hullin 5:5:
“As for the ‘one day’ stated regarding ‘it and its offspring,’ the day follows the night. This was expounded by Shimon ben Zoma: it says in the account of Creation, ‘one day,’ and it says regarding ‘it and its offspring,’ ‘one day.’ Just as the ‘one day’ stated in the account of Creation—the day follows the night—so too the ‘one day’ stated regarding ‘it and its offspring’—the day follows the night.”
And in Bertinoro there:
“‘The one day’ stated regarding ‘it and its offspring,’ etc.—because the passage of ‘it and its offspring’ is adjacent to the section on sacrifices, as it is written, ‘it shall be accepted as a fire-offering sacrifice,’ and immediately after that, ‘it and its offspring.’ And in sacrificial matters, the night follows the day, as it is written (Leviticus 7), ‘on the day his offering is brought it shall be eaten; he shall not leave any of it until morning’—from here we see that the following night is called ‘the day of his offering’ until the morning. One might have thought that here too it is so; therefore [it says ‘day’ here and] it says ‘one day’ in the account of Creation, etc.”
See also this article: https://asif.co.il/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/1.-7-10.pdf
You can find many more discussions of this online.
Okay, I’ll bring an example regarding the beginning of the day.
“And this is what you shall offer upon the altar: two year-old lambs each day, continually.
One lamb you shall offer in the morning, and the second lamb you shall offer at twilight.”
Here it says that a lamb has to be brought twice in the day,
one in the morning and one at twilight.
So from this one could understand that if it’s two per day, one in the morning and one at twilight, then the day does not begin in the evening, and for example the Sabbath would be observed from midday of the seventh day until midday.
On the other hand, it also says, “And there was evening and there was morning, one day.”
Do you think there is an error in the way we practice?