Do Not Assume Someone Else Saw It

The Hook

Chapter two ended with a courtroom. Chapter three opens with the roads leading to it, and it turns out that almost everything difficult about the Jewish calendar happens on those roads rather than in the room. Two men see a sliver of light in the west on Friday evening. One of them is ill. One of them lives close and one of them lives three days away. There are bandits on the eastern approach. And the Rambam, who could have written a chapter about astronomy, writes a chapter about travel.

The line that gives the chapter its spine is almost thrown away. Even if the moon was sighted with a large crescent, plainly visible to everybody, a man may not say: just as we saw it, so did others, and there is no need for us to violate the Sabbath. Every person who saw the new moon, who is fit to testify, and who is within a night and a day of the court, is commanded to violate the Sabbath and go. Read that as a statement about calendars and it is a redundancy. Read it as a statement about people and it is one of the most demanding sentences in the Mishneh Torah.

Every Person Who Saw It

Before the demand comes the limit, and the order matters. If the distance between the witnesses and the court is a night and a day or less, they go. If it is greater, they do not go, because testimony arriving after the thirtieth day accomplishes nothing; the month has already been made full. So the obligation is not a general enthusiasm for testifying. It is bounded by arithmetic. A man four days out who packs his bag on Shabbat is not being pious, he is being wrong, and the Rambam says so before he says anything else.

Inside that radius, though, the Sabbath simply gives way. In our era the prohibitions are set aside only for Rosh Chodesh Nisan and Rosh Chodesh Tishrei, so that the festivals fall in their proper season. In the time of the Temple they were set aside for every single month, because of the musaf offering of Rosh Chodesh, which itself overrides the Sabbath. And it is not only the men who saw the moon. If the court does not know them, the witnesses who can vouch for their character travel too, and desecrate the Sabbath to do it. Even a lone character witness goes, even though one voice alone cannot establish anything, on the chance that he might run into a second man along the way and the two of them together will amount to testimony.

Then the details that make it real. A witness who saw the moon on Friday night and is sick is mounted on a donkey; if he is bedridden, they carry the bed. If there is an ambush waiting, the witnesses take weapons in hand. If the road is long, they take provisions. And then the refusal of the excuse. Not because your sighting adds information. It plainly does not, when the crescent was wide and the whole city was looking. Because a person who saw is a witness, and a witness who stays home has not saved anyone any trouble, he has withheld himself.

The Minchah Line and the Feast of the Full Month

Then the chapter tells a story about a day that went wrong. Originally testimony was accepted throughout the entire thirtieth day. Once the witnesses were delayed and did not arrive until evening, and there was confusion in the Temple; the priests did not know what to do. Bring the afternoon daily offering, and if witnesses then came it would be too late, since the musaf of Rosh Chodesh cannot be offered after the daily afternoon sacrifice. So the court legislated: testimony would be received only until the time of minchah, leaving daylight enough for the musaf offerings, the daily offering, and their libations.

What that produced was a strange hybrid day. If minchah arrived with no witnesses, the daily offering was brought. If witnesses then came after minchah, that day was kept holy and the next day was kept holy too, and the musaf was offered on the following day, because the month was not sanctified after minchah. A day can be observed as Rosh Chodesh without having been declared Rosh Chodesh. And after the Temple was destroyed, Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai and his court gave the whole day back: testimony is accepted all day long, even from witnesses who arrive at the very end of the thirtieth day near sunset, and that day alone is kept.

And then, quietly, one of the most human passages in the treatise. When the court sat the entire thirtieth day and nobody came and the month was made full, they went up to a designated place and held a meal on the thirty first day. Not at night. At daybreak, before the sun rose. No fewer than ten men. And not without bread of grain and legumes, actually eaten during the meal. A feast, with a quorum and a menu, for the day the evidence did not arrive. Somebody understood that a court which has waited all day and seen nothing needs to eat together in the morning.

Bonfires, Messengers, and a Merchant Passing Through

Once the month was sanctified, the news had to travel. At first they lit bonfires on the mountaintops so the distant places would know. When the Samaritans began lighting fires at the wrong times to mislead people, the Sages replaced the fires with messengers on foot. And then the ruling that should stop you cold. These messengers do not violate the sanctity of a festival, nor of Yom Kippur, and needless to say not the Sabbath. Because one may desecrate the Sabbath in order to sanctify the month, and not in order to uphold it.

Sit with that distinction for a moment, because two men are on the same road on the same errand with the same calendar riding on it, and one of them may break the Sabbath and the other may not. The witness is part of how the month comes into being. The messenger is part of how the month gets known. Both matter enormously; only one of them is constitutive. The Rambam even counts out the cost: the messengers for Tishrei travel two days fewer than the messengers for Nisan, because they cannot walk on the first of Tishrei, which is a festival, nor on the tenth, which is Yom Kippur. Communities went without the news for two extra days rather than have a runner move on those days.

Messengers went out for six months, Nisan for Pesach, Av for the fast, Elul so that people would sit waiting on the thirtieth day, Tishrei for the festivals, Kislev for Chanukah, Adar for Purim, and while the Temple stood, Iyar as well, for the small Pesach. Wherever they arrived in time, the festivals were kept for one day as the Torah prescribes. Where they did not arrive, two days were kept out of doubt. And then the Sages levelled it: rather than have some festivals kept differently from others in the same place, every community the Tishrei messengers could not reach keeps two days for everything, Shavuot included, even though the Nisan messengers may have arrived there without difficulty.

Yet the same system that will not let a runner walk on Yom Kippur will accept the news from a stranger. There is no requirement that messengers be two. One is believed. And not only a messenger. A traveling merchant of no particular standing, passing through on his own business, who says he heard from the court that it sanctified the month on such and such a day, is believed, and the festivals are arranged accordingly, because this is a matter that will eventually be revealed. Where a lie cannot survive, a single ordinary voice is enough.

The chapter ends with the court under pressure. Witnesses arrive four or five days late, from far away, saying they saw the moon at its proper time on the thirtieth night, when the month has already been declared full. The court unnerves them, disorients them with questions, cross examines exhaustively, and is extremely precise, because it would rather not undo what it has announced. If they hold firm, and their testimony matches the calculations, and they are known and understanding men, the month is sanctified retroactively and the dates are counted again from the thirtieth day. And if the court needed to leave the month full, it stays full, and this is what the Sages meant by making a month full out of necessity, though great sages disagreed and held that the witnesses are never intimidated at all.

Then the Rambam does something he rarely does. It appears to me, he writes, that the dispute is only about the other months, or about Nisan and Tishrei when the witnesses come after the festivals have already passed and everything has already been done. But if the witnesses come in Nisan or Tishrei before the middle of the month, their testimony is accepted and they are not intimidated at all. And more: when witnesses whose testimony has been shaken look as though they will fail, the court presses them so that the testimony will stand and the month will be sanctified at its proper time. The same pressure, aimed the other way.

The Unifying Principle

The chapter is one long argument that a system built on testimony has to be built on particular people, and that particularity cannot be averaged. The court could have said: with a crescent that wide, someone will show up. Instead the law obligates each individual within range, separately. It sends a lone character witness on the chance that a second appears. It carries a sick man in his bed. And it does all this while refusing to let the enthusiasm run past its purpose, so the man four days out stays home and the messenger who only carries news waits until Yom Kippur is over.

The Baal Shem Tov taught that every person must say the world was created for my sake, and that a soul descends into a body for seventy years to do a single favor for another Jew. That is not sentiment; it is the halachic logic of this chapter. Your sighting is not informationally necessary and it is personally required, and those two facts do not cancel. The Alter Rebbe writes in Tanya that the soul is a portion of God above, literally, which means that no two portions are interchangeable and no one else's report can be submitted under your name.

And the end of the chapter carries a lesson the Tzemach Tzedek is famous for, in his own idiom: think good and it will be good. Look at what the court is actually doing when it pressures witnesses whose testimony is faltering. It is not neutral between the outcomes. It leans, deliberately, toward the month being sanctified at its proper time, and it uses its authority to hold the testimony up rather than let it fall. The Lubavitcher Rebbe drew from this the disposition he asked of everyone: when a matter can go either way, do not stand back and call it objectivity. Lean toward the light.

Modern Application

The excuse the Rambam forbids is the most reasonable sentence a person can say. Somebody else is on it. Somebody already reported it. It was obvious, everyone noticed, my going would have added nothing. And the honest answer is that it is true, and it does not matter. The obligation is not to supply missing data; it is to be present in the establishment of something. The people who show up are the month.

But the chapter is equally hard on the opposite instinct, which is the one that dresses itself up better. The man four days from the court who sets out anyway on Shabbat feels like the hero of the story and is not. The messenger with urgent news who walks on Yom Kippur to save two days of doubt for a whole community is doing real good, and the answer is still no. Knowing whether your effort is constitutive or merely helpful is not a small distinction, and most of the exhaustion people carry comes from never having asked which one they are doing.

The Closing

There is a small detail near the middle of the chapter I cannot get past. The court sat all day. Nobody came. In the morning they went up to a prepared place, ten of them at least, and they ate bread made of grain and legumes together before the sun rose. The evidence had not arrived. The month was full. And the response of the halachah to that particular disappointment is a meal, with a minimum number of people, held early.

So the whole chapter comes down to a man standing in a doorway on Friday night with the moon over his shoulder, doing the arithmetic. How far is the court. Is it Nisan. Am I fit to testify. And then walking, not because the calendar depends on him, since it plainly does not, but because he saw it, and a person who saw is not permitted to hand his seeing to somebody else. And if nobody comes, and the month is made full anyway, then in the morning ten men climb up and break bread over what did not happen. Both of those are the calendar. The going, and the meal afterward.