[Avodah] Molad Alert: Friday night

[kennethgmiller at juno.com]

R' Yitzchok Levine wrote:

> Most people do not know that when the Molad is announced it
> is Jerusalem Solar time.

R' Zev Sero asked:

> As opposed to what?  Standard time (AKA railroad time)?

Standard Time and Railroad Time are not the same thing. Standard Time is the new-fangled artificial stuff based on "Time Zones" that the revenooers forced upon us in the mid-to-late 1800s. Solar Time (also called Local Time) is the old-fashioned natural time, by which each clock is set to have 12:00 Noon at midday, keeping in mind that midday over *here* is different than midday over *there*, even if you're only a short distance away.

Railroad Time was a mess, caused by railroads whose clocks were set according to the Local Time of some point on its route, ignoring the clocks of the towns elsewhere on its route, and also ignoring the clocks of the other trains it would meet with (or crash into). Much info on this is can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone and elsewhere.

But, to answer the question: When the Molad is announced, it is according to a system that does not use the time zones which we have today. And most people are unaware of that fact.

For example, if the molad is announced as being "at exactly 10 AM on Sunday", there will be people in New York who will look at their wristwatch, see that it says "10:00", and they'll think to themselves, "That's exactly 24 hours from now," but they'll be wrong. There will also be people in New York who think, "Yerushalayim is 7 hours ahead of us, so the molad will be in exactly 17 hours," but they'll be wrong too. There will also be people in Yerushalayim who hear the same announcement, and see "10:00" on their watches, and they will say, "That's 24 hours away," but even they will be mistaken.

There will also be some people in Yerushalayim who say, "Hmmm... We are 35 degrees east of Greenwich, so the center of our time zone is at 30 degrees east of Greenwich. That means that at 12 Noon in our time zone, the sun is overhead for the people who are 5 degrees west of us, but it was already overhead here 1/3 of an hour before that. That means midday here is already at 11:40 AM, according to the Time Zone. And if the molad is at 10:00 local time, it will happen when our watches say 9:40 AM. That's 23 2/3 hours from now." -- *Those* are the people who understand the gabbai's announcement.

(Of course, as other posters have mentioned, it's not the *real* molad anyway, just the *calculated* molad. And, for the nit-pickers: More precise calculations would show a 19-minute difference, as opposed to 20, but I tried to keep the math simple.)


R' Yitzchok Levine wrote:

> I have come to the conclusion that the announcement of the
> time of the Molad really does not mean much to most people.

I agree. But then why do we announce it? Is it to reassure us that Rosh Chodesh is on a day that makes sense? Or what?

Akiva Miller

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