Daily Talk
Seventeen chapters of astronomy have brought the court to the point where it can say in advance whether tonight's crescent can be seen. Chapter 18 opens by telling the judges the answer is only probable, and then rules that when the moon goes unseen month after month the court may fix the calendar by arithmetic and may not sanctify a single month with it. Why build an instrument that precise and then forbid it the one thing that matters?
Established, But Not Sanctified
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About This Talk
Chapter 18 closes the reckoning by naming what the reckoning cannot do. The Rambam explains why a moon that ought to be visible is not, whether through cloud, a valley, a mountain standing in the west, or summer air that is like smoke with dust while the clear air of the rainy season shows a larger moon, and he therefore instructs the court to ask every witness two questions, when he saw it and where he was standing. He then faces the case where the moon goes unseen month after month, rejects the obvious remedy of adding a day each time because it would end with the moon visible on the twenty fifth, and produces a tradition reaching back to Moses: alternate full and lacking months, established by calculation and deliberately not sanctified, never fewer than four full months in a year and never more than eight. The chapter ends with the geography of inference, where a sighting in a country east of Eretz Yisrael proves the moon was seen in Eretz Yisrael while a sighting to the west proves nothing at all.