WHY IS A calendar important? (Aside from telling us when to spring forward and fall back, that is.)
One answer comes from our Torah, where G?d tells Moses and Aaron that “this month shall be for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year to you” (Exodus 12:2). The context: Nine plagues have been sent against Pharaoh and his country. Following a hint of the final and most terrible plague – the slaying of the Egyptian firstborn, in direct consequence of Pharaoh’s identical edict against Jewish infants – G?d wants the Jews to mark forever afterward our going-forth from slavery.
But to do that, we first require a calendar – the first mitzvah given to us as a nation.
Slaves don’t need a calendar. They work when ordered to, until commanded to stop. Free people, on the other hand, can organize their time however they wish, so our ancient sages organized the Jewish calendar to be both lunar and solar. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out, its months follow the phases of the moon, with seasons following the position of the sun. In seven years out of nineteen, we add an extra month so as not to, for example, eventually celebrate Pesach (Passover) in the wintertime.
The communal Pesach lamb-feast is the second mitzvah given to us as a nation. So important is this event to our identity that this week’s Torah portion also includes four different directives commanding us to tell our children just what happened on this most momentous of dates.
Perhaps that’s why Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel calls Judaism “a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time.” And that’s the perfect kavvanah (intention) to hold as we enter into Shabbat!