[Avodah] Not Making Kiddush Between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m.

[kennethgmiller at juno.com]

(ATTENTION MODERATORS: This is a RESEND. Three digests have appeared since I posted it, so I'm guessing that you never received it. But it is possible that you did receive it, and are still discussing whether or not to publish it, in which case please ignore this copy.)


Before I begin, I'll quote what R' Shalom Simon wrote:
> I understand the source from this is Shabbos 129b.
> In fact, there's a nice little chart in the Artscroll
> Gemara on daf 129b1.  It shows that Ma'dim influences
> on Fridays between 6-7 pm.
I give many many thanks to him for pointing out that daf and that chart. It helped me a great deal to clarify and illustrate the thoughts below.

R' Yitzchok Levine wrote:
> But presumably this reason for avoiding a certain hour
> to make Kiddush predates the institution of the secular
> hour by the Babylonians. For a discussion of this see
> http://tinyurl.com/yugh47  and http://tinyurl.com/9rb7r.
> Thus, if doing this is to make sense, the hour should be
> Shaos Z'manios, not (gentile) hours.

It seems to me that the source of your confusion lies in the words you have chosen. You keep getting hung up by the word "hour". Let's try rephrasing the problem without using that term.

It is not that a certain "hour" is inappropriate to say kiddush. Rather, Kiddush is to be avoided while under the influence of Mars.

When it is that we are under the influence of Mars? Well, Chazal knew (don't ask me how they knew) that seven specific "stars" exert their influence in a specific rotation. They follow one another in a specific sequence: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon. They each get the same amount of time, and this sequence is repeated 24 times each week.

Once you have that information, and also know something about the starting point (or at least about some midpoint), you can figure out... Well, no, you can't really figure it out yet. It would be like making a menora from a kikar of gold, without a scale with which to weigh out that kikar of gold. In other words, we need units of measurement, tools to measure those units, and enough mathematics to do some calculations.

Enter the Babylonians with their state-of-the-art arithmetic (I think their geometry and trig was pretty good too, but we don't need that for this) and behold: If the seven stars go through 24 cycles a week, then each turn lasts 1/24 of a day! An hour!

There's nothing holy or unholy about the Babylonians' math. It's just plain convenient. I don't see it as any different than getting my computer to figure out Sof Zman Shema.

Next: Are these Shaos Zmanios or Shaos Shavos? Well, consider this. We are not dealing with half of the morning. We are not dealing with the late afternoon. We are not dealing with anything that has anything to do with sunrise or sunset. Rather, we are dealing with the larger solar system as a whole. Each star gets a turn lasting 1/168 of a week.

Why would a star's turn be longer during a summer daytime than a winter daytime, or than a summer night? The season is irrelevant. Please let me point out some other halachos which also use Shaos Shavos: Waiting from meat to milk doesn't change with the seasons. Salting meat doesn't change with the seasons. Certain things are forbidden in the half-hour prior to a mitzvah's zman, and that doesn't change with the season.

I hope the above serves to explain what we mean by "hour" in this discussion.

But as I was developing these thoughts, other ideas arose in my mind.

(For the purposes of this post, let's presume that Bavel is located exactly 15 degrees east of Israel, okay? Thanks.) When it is a given time in Israel, it is an hour later in Bavel. That means that at the moment when Mars begins to have influence over Israel, it is ceasing to have influence over Bavel, and the Sun begins its influence of Bavel.

I had started to write that we are not dealing with Standard Time Zones here, but actually, we very much ARE dealing with time zones. Imagine the picture: Mars is exerting its influence over a strip of Earth, running from the north pole to the south, 15 degrees wide. The Sun is exerting its influence over another strip just to the east. It's *not* the case that these influences get turned on and off like a light switch. Rather, the influences stay put, the earth revolves, and each point on earth passes from one star's zone to the next. 

(Note: To the east of the Sun's zone lies Venus' zone of influence, and then Mercury's. Keep on going, and soon you'll be asking shailos about the Date Line. Let's not go there today, okay?)

Anyway, it is clear from all this, as I understand it, that the problem is not necessarily from 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM Standard Time, but rather according to whatever clocks the stars follow. I see no reason in logic or math which requires the stars' cycle to be based on the local midday. They could just as easily start at 7.3 minutes after the hour, or whenever. But it does seem clear from the Gemara Shabbos 129b that they do indeed happen to follow our customary calculations. (Perhaps this is similar to what the Rambam wrote about Shmita: "Divide the year by 7, and if there's no remainder, it is a shmita year; not because it has to be, but because that's how it worked out.")

I wanted to write more, but I can't remember the rest. Maybe I'll follow up with another post later. Thanks for reading.

Akiva Miller

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