[Avodah] Where is the Molad announced for?

[David Cohen]

R' Micha Berger wrote:
>> As I've posted in the past, we can equally ask: When the molad
>> *interval*was most accurate, on whose clock was the *time* the
>> molad actually happened similarly most accurate? ...
>> ... One explanation I find plausible: It's somewhere around the
>> middle of the Yishuv in those days, around half-way between EY
>> and Bavel.

I don't think that they *first* picked an exact meridian and *then* set the
molad to exactly correspond to the moment of the mean conjunction expressed
in the mean solar time of that meridian.  Note that the molad is expressed
to the precision of a chelek, and mean solar time changes by one chelek for
every 50 "seconds of longitude."  At the latitude of Jerusalem, that's
about 1.3 km.  You'd have to explain why they chose exactly the meridian
that they did, and not 2 km to the west or 2 km to the east, which would
result in the molad being one chelek earlier or later.

Rather, I think that the answer lies in "Molad VeYad," the molad Tishrei of
Adam's creation according to R' Eliezer (Year 2, according to our
counting), which is exactly at 14 hours and 0 chalakim into Friday (8:00
a.m.in our parlance).  A molad (of any month) will only fall exactly on the
hour, with no chalakim, approximately every 87.3 years.  Having a molad
Tishrei exactly on the hour is even rarer, with that happening, *on
average*, just once every 1,080 years.  It seems like an unlikely
coincidence for this to have happened just by chance in what was considered
by many to be the first month of our calendar.  (We now call it Year 2, but
the practice in Bavel was to call that year Year 1.)

So I think that the molad was certainly set to be accurate for that general
area of the world , and hence that first molad was set for 14 hours into
Friday, rather than 13 or 15, but that it was set for exactly 14 hours and
0 chalakim simply in order to have a nice, round starting point for
calculations.  Sure, you could then work backwards and calculate the
*exact* meridian in whose mean solar time that the molad would have been
accurate for in some given year, but I think that's somewhat beside the
point.

-- D.C.
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