The Testimony Nobody Needed

The Hook

Yesterday the Rambam established that a month does not begin because the moon rose. It begins because a court said so, and he told us that the court reckons like an astronomer before it ever lets a witness open his mouth. Today he shows us the room. Who is allowed in it, what they are asked, what happens to a man who saw the moon in a puddle, and what happens when two honest men disagree by two storeys about how high it hung.

And in the middle of all that procedure, in the seventh halachah, sits a sentence that has nothing to do with astronomy at all. Everyone who saw the moon and is fit to testify comes to the court. The judges gather them into one place and make a large feast for them, so that people will keep coming. The first pair is examined properly. The rest are then asked questions of a broader kind, and the Rambam says plainly that their testimony is not required at all, and that they are questioned only so that they will not go home disheartened. A court sitting in judgment on the calendar of the entire Jewish people stops to interview men whose answers it does not need, so that nobody walks out feeling useless. Why is that in a book of law?

Who May Say It, and What Counts as Seeing

Start with who is let in. Two adult men, fit to testify about anything at all. Not one. Women and slaves are not accepted here, and neither is a man disqualified only by rabbinic decree, even though the Torah itself would have taken him. The court has narrowed its own intake below what the written law demands, and the Rambam will explain why in a moment.

Then a small detail that reveals how the room works. A father and son both saw the moon, and both should go to the court. Not because relatives may testify together, since they may not, but because one of them might turn out to be disqualified for a reason nobody knew about, and then the other can be paired with a different man and the testimony stands. Bring both, because you do not know in advance which of you will be the one who counts.

Now the astonishing admission. By Torah law, the Rambam says, none of this precision is required. If a month was sanctified on testimony and it later emerged that the witnesses had perjured themselves, the month remains sanctified. So the early courts accepted any Jew who came, on the presumption that a Jew is fit until proven otherwise. Then the followers of Baithos began paying men to swear to a moon they had not seen, and the court decreed that it would take testimony only from men it knew to be acceptable, and would examine them. The whole apparatus of vetting is a fence built after a scandal, on top of a law that never required it.

The questioning itself is beautiful. The court has already calculated, in the manner of the astronomers, where the moon should be: north of the sun or south of it, a wide crescent or a narrow one, which way the horns of it would point. Then the witnesses are asked exactly that. Where did you see it, north or south. Which way were its corners turned. How high did it look to you, and how wide. If the answers fit, the testimony is taken. If they do not fit, it is not.

And what does not count as seeing. We saw it in water. We saw it behind the clouds. We saw it in a mirror. Nothing, in every case, and nothing even where half was in the open sky and half in the glass. A reflection is not a sighting. Then the measure of disagreement: two storeys against three may be joined, three against five may not, and yet either man may still be joined with some other witness who matches him or differs by a single storey. Nobody is called a liar over a gap of two. He is simply not a match for that particular man, and the court goes looking for a better fit.

And then the one that goes straight to the heart. Witnesses say: we saw it without paying attention, and afterward, when we concentrated deliberately in order to testify, we could not see it. That is not testimony, because perhaps clouds gathered and looked like a moon and then dispersed. But if they saw it in the east before sunrise on the twenty ninth and again in the west on the thirtieth night, they are believed, and the morning sighting is simply ignored as a trick of the clouds, because the evening one was at its proper time. What a man glimpses while looking at something else does not become evidence by being reported afterward.

The Feast, and the Pairs No One Needed

Which brings us to the feast. Everyone who saw comes in. The judges put them all in one room and lay on a large meal, the Rambam says, so that people will come regularly. The first pair to arrive is examined first, and within that pair the greater man is brought into the private chamber first and asked the technical questions, and if his account matches the calculation his companion is brought in, and if the two accounts are comparable the testimony is established. Done. The month has what it needs.

And then the court turns to the rest of the room and questions them anyway, in a looser way, about broader things. The Rambam does not leave us guessing about the reason. Their testimony is not required at all, and they are asked only so that they will not depart disheartened, and so that they will come again another time.

Consider the position those men are in. Each of them stood outside in the cold and watched the western sky at the exact hour, and saw the sliver, and hurried into the city, and waited his turn, and by the time his turn came the thing had already been accomplished by two men who happened to walk in first. There is no legal need for him. And the court, which does not have unlimited time on the thirtieth day, and which will lose the whole month if it does not pronounce the word before dark, spends some of that time asking him what he saw.

Notice also that the reason given is partly practical, so that they will come frequently in the future. The Rambam is not being merely tender. He is saying that a calendar which depends on ordinary people going outside to look at the sky cannot afford to make looking at the sky feel pointless. If the men who came late are sent home unasked, next month they will not bother, and eventually there will be no first pair either. The dignity of the unneeded witness is a load bearing element of the system.

Sanctified Even If They Were Wrong

Then the declaration. The testimony is established, and the head of the court says, it is sanctified, and all the people answer, it is sanctified, it is sanctified. Three judges at minimum, and three for the calculation as well. Only at its proper time, and only by day. Sanctified at night, it is of no consequence at all.

And here the Rambam sets down the ruling that decides everything. Even if the court and the entire Jewish people saw the moon with their own eyes, and even if the witnesses were fully cross examined, if the court did not manage to say the word before the nightfall that begins the thirty first day, the month is not sanctified. It is a full month, and the thirty first day is Rosh Chodesh, although the moon was plainly there on the thirtieth night. Because the month is not established by the sighting. It is established by a court saying, it is sanctified.

He softens the timing a little, and only a little. If the judges themselves see the moon at the end of the twenty ninth day before a single star has come out, they may declare it on the spot, since it is technically still day. If they see it on the thirtieth night after two stars have appeared, then in the morning two other judges join one of the three, and the other two testify before that court, and those three sanctify. The law will find a way to reconstitute a court. It will not find a way to move nightfall.

And then the last halachah of the chapter, which is the point of all of it. Once the court has sanctified the month, it is sanctified, whether they erred unwittingly, or were deliberately misled by false witnesses, or were forced into it. The festivals are calculated from the day they named. And even a man who knows for certain that they were wrong is obligated to rely on them, because the matter is entrusted to them and to nobody else, and the One who commanded us to keep the festivals is the same One who commanded us to rely on them.

The Unifying Principle

Put the two halves together and the chapter stops being a procedure and becomes an argument. The court builds an extraordinarily fine filter. Only men fit to testify about anything. Not a man disqualified even rabbinically. Character witnesses sent along from the home town. Astronomical calculation done in advance. Questions about the corners of the crescent. No reflections, no puddles, no half glimpses, no sightings caught out of the corner of an eye. And then, at the end, the Rambam tells you that the month stands even if the whole thing was built on perjury.

So the filter is not there to guarantee truth. It cannot; the last halachah says so out loud. The filter is there because the court is obligated to try, and the reliance is there because the people are obligated to accept. Two separate duties, and neither is a substitute for the other. A court that shrugged and took anybody would be violating its duty even though the month would still be valid. A man who kept his own festivals because he had privately worked out that the court erred would be violating his, even though he might be factually right.

The Alter Rebbe writes in Tanya, quoting the Tikkunei Zohar, that a mitzvah performed without intention is like a body without wings. The deed is entirely real; it simply does not rise. The Rambam's witnesses illustrate the same thing from the far side. The men who saw the moon without concentrating on it saw a real moon, and their report is worth nothing, because a glance is a body without wings. And the court's declaration, made in the daylight of the thirtieth with three judges present, has wings even if the moon behind it was a rumor.

Modern Application

The Baal Shem Tov taught that a person is shown what he is shown for a reason, that nothing passes before your eyes by accident. Which sounds, at first, like the opposite of this chapter, where half of what people see is thrown out as clouds and reflections. But look again at the man whose testimony was not needed. His sighting is legally inert and he was still summoned in and asked what he saw. The Rambam does not pretend his answers matter to the calendar. He arranges the room so that they matter to him. Most of us do the reverse. We tell a person his contribution was essential when it was not, which he can usually sense, instead of simply giving him our attention, which he can always sense.

And then the harder application. Somebody in your life has been declared, and the declaration was made by a court that may well have been misled. A reputation was fixed. A role in the family was assigned. A version of an old argument became the official one. The Rambam's ruling here is not that you must believe the court was right. He explicitly allows for the man who knows they erred. It is that some determinations are the kind that only a court can make, and that living as though your private reckoning has already overturned them is not integrity, it is a second calendar. The Sfat Emet taught that the renewal of the month is entrusted to Israel because Israel is given the power of renewal itself, that a Jew is not only in time but is asked to make time. That power is real precisely because it is binding, including on the person who thinks it was used badly.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe returned often to the Sages' reading of the verse about the festivals, that the word for them can be read as you, and that the appointed times are yours even when you set them in error, even when you set them deliberately, even when you were misled. Not because error is fine. Because God would rather have a calendar held by human beings who sometimes get it wrong than a perfect one held by nobody. That is an enormous statement about how much He wanted this to be a partnership.

The Closing

A chapter that begins by refusing a man who saw the moon in a bucket of water ends by accepting a month founded on paid liars. That is not inconsistency. It is the difference between what a court must do and what a court has done. The care is not the guarantee; the care is the offering.

The moon is not consulted. It rises, it is looked at by a few cold men on a rooftop, and then everything depends on whether three judges said a word out loud in the last of the daylight. And in the middle of that afternoon, with the light going and the festivals of an entire year hanging on the sentence, the court stops to ask a man a few questions about a moon it has already stopped needing to hear about, so that he will not walk home feeling that his night on the roof was wasted. Whoever wrote that into the law understood something about why people keep looking up.