[Avodah] bavel leadership

[Micha Berger]

On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 12:59:49AM +0100, Arie Folger wrote:
: In short, and doing a tremendous injustice to his talk, there was a
: period, which probably lasted decades, during which the Boethitians
: were in charge of the Beit haMiqdash. They used the Dead Sea sect
: calendar, which is a solar calendar, based on 364 days a year, so that
: every holiday always begins on the same day of the year...

I heard this before. Possibly from RSZNeiman -- he lives around the corner
from the house I gre up in, and is a regular in the shul where I had my
beris, bar mitzvah, aufruf, one of my triplets' berissos, etc...

But I thought it was the Tzeduqim.

The Baisusim have no record outside of Chazal.

The Essenes aren't mentioned by Chazal.

It's possible they're the same people. A few times the Yerushalmi refers
to the Beis Issim.

But there is no indication either camp was big enough to control anything.

As for the 364 day calendar... It would fit the gemara's description of
the Tzeduqi understanding of the omer -- albeit probably not as your
rebbe taught it in school. "Mimakharas haShabbos" doesn't mean the
Sunday after the first day of Pesach, regardless of when it falls out,
but that the first day of Pesach must be Shabbos!

The Xians who set Easter on Sunday probably did as well. Although they
would have believed that Pesach was always on Friday, not Shabbos.

The Qumran group had a 364 day calendar, but we don't know who they were.

I downloaded the shiurim. I'll comment more when I have time to listen
to it.


But all that explains why they didn't know this particular din, not why
they were blown away by his making an organized science of the system
of derashah in general.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             When you come to a place of darkness,
micha at aishdas.org        you don't chase out the darkness with a broom.
http://www.aishdas.org   You light a candle.
Fax: (270) 514-1507        - R' Yekusiel Halberstam of Klausenberg zt"l