Daily Talk
There is no longer any doubt about when the month begins. Everyone in the world runs the same fixed calculation and arrives at the same day. And still the diaspora keeps a second day of every festival, and everyone everywhere keeps two days of Rosh HaShanah. Why would the Rambam preserve a practice whose entire reason has expired?
The Doubt That Ended and the Day That Stayed
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About This Talk
Kiddush HaChodesh 5 hands the whole apparatus of sighting and intercalation to the Sanhedrin in Eretz Yisrael and rules that when no such court sits, the fixed calendar governs and a sighting counts for nothing. It then explains that the second festival day of the diaspora, once a real hedge against real uncertainty, survives now only as the custom of one's ancestors, and that the second day of Rosh HaShanah is kept even in Eretz Yisrael. It closes by insisting that our own calculations establish nothing at all, and that we are merely reading off the reckoning of the people in the Land.