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

Something Parishas Eymar charts in a deceptively simple list of festivals and holy days.

Now time plays an enormous part in Judaism.

The first thing 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 sanctified time by determining and applying the Jewish calendar.

The prophets were the first 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 with timelessness.

Isaiah Berlin used to quote Alexander Herzen who said about the Slavs that they had no history, only geography.

Jews, he said, were the exact opposite. They had 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's received less attention than it should, namely

the duality that runs through the entire Jewish structure of time. Take for instance the calendar

as a whole. Christianity uses a solar calendar.

Islam uses a lunar one.

But 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 just one beginning,

whether it's at nightful or daybreak or midnight, whatever.

For Judaism, for calendar purposes,

the Jewish day begins at nightful,

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