Maybe it was the sudden burst of sunny weather that had long-buried bulbs pushing out of their beds in an explosion of bloom and colour, or the unseasonable warmth that gifted us here in Canada with a chag ha’aviv – a festival of spring – that truly felt spring-like. But over and over, people kept saying to me during the last round of festival celebration: “Ah, the holidays are late this year.”
The current festival, Shavuot, it seems, will be late, as well. So far as I know, only Jews regularly comment on the premature or tardy arrival of their festival days. Other cultures seem to have better-trained holidays, as punctual and prompt as Swiss trains and computerized birthday reminders.
Ours, by contrast, are made more unruly by the interplay between lunar months and solar years. Like overeager dinner guests, our holidays catch us before we’ve mopped up the mess in the kitchen. Or, like party prima donnas, they make a grand entrance after the hors d’oeuvres have disappeared and the main course has dried up in the oven.
Cleaning up from the endless array of meals that are the hallmark of any Jewish celebration, I began to mull over what the appropriate rejoinder should be to remarks about the earliness or lateness of our holidays. Although Passover is long over, its accouterments safely tucked away for next year, Shavuot is upon us, and it, too, promises to be “late.” As all future major and minor festivals and fast days will be either early or late, I thought I should be prepared.
How might one respond to comments about the untimeliness of our holidays? One might offer a response that is simply informative, even pedagogic. “Yes, they’re late this year, of course. It’s a leap year.” Or, “Early? Yes, certainly. That’s why next year is a leap year.”
Or one might offer the more elaborate, pedantic response. “You know, don’t you, that the lunar calendar must be periodically adjusted to keep it in synch with the seasons of the solar year. The Jewish calendar works on a 19-year cycle, adding a total of seven months over the course of 19 years. Holidays are always ‘late’ in the third, sixth, eighth, 11th, 14th, 17th and 19th years, because that’s when we add the extra month. Oh, and you must know that not every non-leap year has the same number of days, nor does every leap year have the same number of days. That’s because sometimes, some months have 29 days, and sometimes these months have 30 days. The way it works is…”
By this point, before you can even get to the part about which days of the week certain holidays will never, ever, fall on, whoever made the innocent comment about the un-punctual holiday has long since disappeared, and you notice that people are staring at the person walking down the street and muttering into the air about months and days and moons and suns.
Alternatively, one might offer a statistical response, citing the number of times in a 100-year span that Pesach occurs in early and in late April, or that Shavuot occurs in May or in June. Or one might try the homiletic approach. “No, it is not the holiday that is early or late. The holiday is always on time. It is we who are too early or too late.” Or the personal response: “The year I was born, the holiday was also very late.” Or the perplexed response: “Why can’t they just figure this holiday thing out for once and for all?” Or the frustrated response: “How can I be ready for the holiday when it comes this early?” Or the paranoid response: “They are deliberately trying to keep us off-guard.” Or the feminist response: “The rabbis wanted to keep women in the kitchen.” Or the Zen response: “Whenever it is, there it is.”
As a literature professor, I’m partial to the metaphorical approach. This perennial tussle of riptides and solar squalls, this managed chaos that comes of dancing in the moonlight and singing in the sunshine to separate rhythms, this tension of ordering the ebb and flow of our lives according to celestial bodies that have their own distinct and different orbits – isn’t this the stuff of our lives? Isn’t it, after all, the blessing of creation?