Rabbi Heller's Blog

When does the day begin and end? On the Jewish calendar, a new date begins with the evening, and so, with the setting of the sun we embark on a new day. However, this is by no means an obvious answer. Of course, in our modern world, the answer is assumed to be midnight. In some ways, this makes things very easy. Very little is going on in the middle of the night. Most people (I’m told) are asleep at that time, so it's easy to make a clean division between the days. The proof text for our evening practice comes from this week’s portion and it has some important implications for how we live our Jewish lives.

Why the evening? Of course, the very act of creation begins with God saying (Genesis 1:3) “Let there be light.” The passage concludes by saying (Genesis 1:5) “there was evening, there was morning, the first day.” So it would see straightforward that each day begins at evening.  But it is not so simple. If the universe began with the creation of light, surely it began with daytime? Indeed, Rashbam (a medieval commentator who was Rashi’s grandson) interpreted the verse hyper-literally to imply that the day begins with dawn and ends with dawn the next day. Indeed, there are many places where the biblical text assumes the day starts at morning (for example, Genesis 19, the story of Lot and his daughters, assumes that the next morning is the next day), and Psalms talk of the day as being dawn to dusk. The Talmud (first chapter of tractate Berakhot) also briefly considers a morning-to-morning option before rejecting it. Instinctively the “day starts at dawn” option matches with our instincts, that we define the start of our day by when we awaken. When I am up after midnight Sunday night and sending emails, and I say “tomorrow morning,” everyone understands that I mean Monday morning, a few hours later, event though 2:00 AM is already Monday morning, so technically “tomorrow” should refer to Tuesday.

However, this week’s parashah, Emor, sets the record straight. Leviticus 23 offers a comprehensive calendar of all the Jewish holidays. In speaking about Yom Kippur (which is the 10th of Tishrei), it says “you shall afflict your souls on the ninth day of the month at evening.” It goes on to say that this evening start applies to all holidays: “ from evening to evening, you shall observe your sabbaths.” This clearly implies that Yom Kippur starts in the evening. However, there is a conceptual challenge- if the day starts in the evening, then it should already be the 10^th when the holiday starts, and the verse should just say “the evening of the 10th” not the 9th!

The sages (Yoma 81b) actually take this subtlety of language to imply something different- that even though the day does start with the evening, it is a mitzvah to start holidays earlier and end them later- to add at least a few minutes to the start and the end. In the end, Shabbat and holidays last even longer because we are not sure whether “evening” refers to sundown (the beginning of the end of the day) or dark (the end of the end of the day), there is a stretch of time that technically belongs to both days. This means we start Shabbat 18 minutes before sundown, and end it anywhere from 25 to 72 minutes later! So the fast of Yom Kippur technically starts just a bit before sundown and, therefore, does in fact start on the 9^th of the Hebrew month, and runs a few minute into the 11^th. (Of course, the holiday is even longer for those who camp out early to get good seats!)

There is a deeper spiritual significance to living in Jewish time. If we measure dates as the secular world does, going from midnight to midnight, we simply awaken to find ourselves in a new experience (unless we have stayed up late on New Year’s Eve, which is the exception that proves the rule, as it is one of only two non-Jewish days that start the night before).

In contrast, in Judaism, we give special meaning to those transitional moments. By having the new day start at sundown, we make the process of entering or leaving the holy day an active, intentional experience. We mark those in-between times with ritual, and with a consciousness that we are moving from one spiritual state to another. In doing so, we expand the scope of holy times beyond their temporal boundaries, to bring holiness even more into the everyday.