You all know from long experience with me that I am fascinated by calendars – how Jewish time lines up with secular time, how the moon plays off the sun. I love the astronomy behind it and the astrology that flows from it and the meaning we make of it.

Tonight is a marvelous meaning-making moment. It is Shabbat HaChodesh. The annual Shabbat preceding the month of Nisan. Tonight, rather spectacularly, we have an exact alignment of Shabbat and New Moon. As the sun went down tonight, it became not only Sabbath but the new month and – hold onto your shtreimls – a new year.

There are several Jewish new years, as you might recall, because there are several Jewish years, in the same way that in our secular world we live simultaneously in a calendar year and a fiscal year and a school year. And each of those years has its special days – tax day, graduation, new year’s eve – and we are not daunted or confused by that.

Same in Jewish.

Tonight, the 1st of Nisan, is the new year in the Torah reckoning of time. Rosh Hashanah, when we busy ourselves saying “happy new year” to each other, is not referrred to in Torah as a new year at all, but onl y as a holiday taking place on the first day of the seventh month.

No, tonight is the real deal. The beginning of the calendar. It is a couple months after the sap began running. It is just on the heels of the equinox. It corresponds to the arrival of spring, as we look ahead to see what effect the winter’s rains will have had. As it says in Song of Songs:

ק֥וּמִי לָ֛ךְ רַעְיָתִ֥י יָפָתִ֖י וּלְכִי־לָֽךְ׃
כִּֽי־הִנֵּ֥ה הַסְּתָ֖ו עָבָ֑ר הַגֶּ֕שֶׁם חָלַ֖ף הָלַ֥ךְ לֽוֹ׃

Arise my love, my fair one, come away!
For lo the winter is past and the rains are gone.
Blossoms dot the landscape . . .
The fig tree brings forth her green figs
The blossoming vines give off fragrance,
Arise my love, my fair one, and come away!
(Song of Songs 2:10-13)

The sages always teach us to understand the poetry of Song of Songs as the love duet of God and Israel. And here, in these verses, when the rain is past and the spring arrives, the Divine invites the Children of Israel out of Egypt. Arise my love, come away. And sure enough, two weeks into this new spring month, this new year, the exodus comes.

It is in the Book of Exodus, in the story of the exodus, that we receive the commandment to conceive of this moment as the beginning of the unfolding of the months of the year. The commandment comes to us after the occurrence of nine of the plagues, with the worst still to come, and Pharaoh, over and over, hardening his heart. At that moment, in the quiet that follows the plague of darkness, we suddenly have this:

וַיֹּ֤אמֶר יְהֹוָה֙ אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֣ה וְאֶֽל־אַהֲרֹ֔ן בְּאֶ֥רֶץ מִצְרַ֖יִם לֵאמֹֽר׃

הַחֹ֧דֶשׁ הַזֶּ֛ה לָכֶ֖ם רֹ֣אשׁ חֳדָשִׁ֑ים רִאשׁ֥וֹן הוּא֙ לָכֶ֔ם לְחָדְשֵׁ֖י הַשָּׁנָֽה׃

“Adonai said to Moshe and Aharon in the land of Egypt: this month, this chodesh, shall be for you the beginning of the months; it shall be the first of the months of the year for you.” (Exodus 12:1-2)

This commandment to follow the moon is the first commandment given to us as a people. Most of the rest we get later, at Mount Sinai, once we are free of our bondage and we find ourselves in the broad spaces of the Wilderness. But this one, the demand that we pay attention to time using the moon as our guide, comes to us while we are still in the narrow confines of slavery, with an uncertain future ahead.

There is something to notice about this. The word for month, chodesh, appears three times in this one verse. Sometimes you hear a word so much that you no longer notice where it comes from. Our word “month” – who even remembers that it is a form of the word “moon?” That a month, in English, is not a collection of days, but a cycle of moon?

In Hebrew, chodesh, “month,” comes from the root chadash, meaning “new.” Chodesh is a noun that points in its narrowest literal sense to the new moon, but also then to the whole moon cycle. And arguably to a certain quality of newness and ongoing renewal. Tonight is a new moon in the sky, but it is also the beginning of a chodesh, a whole month of renewal, of newification.

Torah also commands a respect for the solar year. The seasons are solar; they are a function of the earth’s tilt as it orbits the sun. And an understanding of the seasons is necessary for all of our agriculture and thus for our physical survival as a community. We need to accede to the sovereignty of the sun if we are to know when to plant and when to harvest. And we get those commandments down the road, at Mt. Sinai.

But here, now, in Egypt, our first commandment is to notice the moon! The waxing and waning; the brightening and dimming of the night sky; the intricate game of hide and seek that the moon plays with the sun, sometimes getting right between us, and sometimes cowering behind our backs; feeling the connection of moon to the tides of the ocean; feeling the connection of moon to our bodies, our wombs. All of this is so intimate, so part of our lives or at least our pre-industrial lives. And none of it is clearly necessary for our physical survival.

So why are we commanded to notice the moons and tell time by them? Maybe it is not our physical survival but our spiritual survival and revival that are at stake. Enslaved in Egypt, with its 365-day solar calendar, we were asked to imagine time differently.

Until we were free, we didn’t need to know how the sun affected our crops. But noticing the moon and its constant cycle of chodesh, of renewal: this we needed in order to become free in the first place. The idea of renewal needed to be seeded in the dark soil of our bondage. We needed to be able to imagine a life that was dynamic, changing, growing, ebbing maybe, but then renewing again.

It is the moon, not the sun, that governs our dreams. And we needed to dream a different life, to dream a renewed self, before we could even think of putting on our sandals, packing our matzah, and taking our first step toward freedom.

Tonight is Shabbat HaChodesh. The new moon has faithfully appeared tonight, heralding our imminent liberation. In just two weeks we will take up our gear and burst forth into freedom. And so may it be in every time that feels dark and confining, that we may look to the moon and remember that time is dynamic, that every moment is movement. May we see the moon and have faith that light will once again illumine our steps.

And so we enter a new year, of months, of chodashim, of renewal, and find new meaning in each one:

Nisan – moon of rebirth and liberation
Iyar – moon of gathering and counting
Sivan – moon of revelation and relationship
Tamuz – moon of broken walls
Av – moon of Shekhinah’s weeping
Elul – moon of Divine intimacy
Tishrei – moon of return and harvest
Cheshvan – moon of nothing happening
Kislev – moon of long nights
Tevet – moon of Esther’s crowning
Shevat – moon of sap awakening
Adar – moon of our abundant joy.

For the naming of months at the end of this drash, I am indebted to the moon-naming styles of the Tlingit, Tewa, Ojibwa, and Omaha people, recorded in J. Ruth Gendler, Changing Light: The Eternal Cycle of Night and Day (1991), including the direct borrowing of from the Omaha nation of “Moon in which nothing happens.”