The duality of Jewish time.

Alongside the holiness of place and person is the holiness of time,

something Parachat-Emer charts in its deceptively simple list of festivals and holy days.

Time plays an enormous part in Judaism.

The first thing God declared holy was a day, Shabbat, at the conclusion

of creation. The first mitzvah given to the Jewish people as a whole prior to the Exodus was the command

to sanctify time. A Chodesh, He He He He He Heer Lachem, Exodus 12, determining and applying the Jewish calendar.

The prophets were the first people in history to see God in history, seeing time itself as the

arena of the divine human encounter. Virtually every other religion and civilization before

and since has identified

God, reality and truth with timelessness.

Asa Berlin used to quote Alexander Hertzen, who said about the Slavs that they had no history,

only geography. The Jews, he said, had the reverse, a great deal of history, but all too little geography. Much time, but little space. So time in Judaism is an essential medium of the spiritual life. But there's one feature of the Jewish approach to time that has received less attention than it should, the duality that

runs through the entire temporal structure. Take, for instance, the calendar as a whole. Christianity

uses a solar calendar, Islam a lunar one. Judaism uses both. We count time both by the monthly cycle of the moon and the seasonal cycle

of the sun. Then consider the day. Days normally have one identifiable beginning, whether at

nightfall or at daybreak or as in the West, somewhere between.

For calendar purposes, the Jewish day begins at nightfall.

Vahirah, voha, yom'achad.

It was evening and it was morning one day.

But if we look at the structure of the prayers,

the morning prayer was instituted by Abraham, afternoon by Isaac, evening by Jacob. There's a sense in which the worship of the day starts in the morning, not in the night before. Years two usually have

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