Shana tova!

This weekend was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year! I looked it up, and we are now on year # 5,770, counting since the beginning of the world. It's disconcerting, isn't it, to imagine living under a different calendar from the one we're used to? Since time-stamping e-mails would be a computer programmer's hell otherwise, the Gregorian calendar has been universally accepted. It's true that the Gregorian calendar is highly practical, like an equal-tempered piano, but lunar-solar calendars like the Jewish calendar resonate so beautifully with the motion of the astronomical bodies involved. Each month corresponds to a phase of the Moon, and because there aren't quite 12 of these in the time it takes the Earth to travel around the Sun, they add an extra month every two or three years.

Weeks are also seven days long, having no basis in astronomy but rather the biblical seven days of creation. The Jews have figured that the seventh day of rest falls on Saturday instead of Sunday, and it is called the Sabbath. Moreover, days officially begin at sundown. Until you have really lived through a day that begins at sundown, this will always just seem like an arbitrary fact, but studying the schedule of performances at the competition in Israel I am noticing that the rounds always end early in the afternoon on Fridays, and nothing is scheduled on Saturdays, to allow us to observe the Sabbath.

It will definitely be interesting to get a feel for how this different conception of the structure of time affects daily life in Israel.