The Hebrew Calendar: Insights for Our Days
Our commonly used Gregorian calendar, a relatively new system differs in fundamental ways from that of the Hebrew understanding of the structure of history. The Jewish calendar begins with the creation of humankind and its view of history runs from Adam and Eve forward. Its etymology tells us that the head of the year, Rosh Hashana also is the fount of study that transforms and perfects a Hebrew lexicon will tell us. History will be transformative and good. The first redemption, from Egypt, liberated the nation of Israel to serve G-d in their land, held by inalienable birthright from Him and enabled the repair of the natural creation damaged by Adam and Eve. Nisan, the month of Passover and Tishrei, that of Rosh Hashana balance each other, holiness and nature, the first and seventh months of the year. Spell out the letters associated with each month and one gets hei lamed: “here is teaching.” Seven became a ‘lucky number’ in a holy structure.
Like Hebrew thought, faith and practice, its sense of time is uniquely historical. Human events are a drama unfolding via the intersection of free will choices, words and deeds and divine grace and purpose. As a famous Mishna (”record”) states, “everything is foreseen, yet freedom of choice is given, and the world is judged by grace, but all is according to the amount of the work” (Pirke Avot 3:19).
That is, human freedom to choose is the basis of our dignity and responsibility and combines with the grace and purpose of the Eternal One to unfold the precise pace and specifics of human history and individual lives. The amount and quality of human works have enormous impact on the journey we travel. ”Everything is foreseen, but freedom of choice is given.” Along the way, we are the partners of the Almighty. Our actions matter to G-d and His creation; everything is ‘remembered’ and accounted for. That is the Jewish idea.
These fundamental principles affect the calendar, too; or rather, they affect not only the quality and specifics of human events and history but the timing of redemption which in Jewish thought has as its prerequisite the re-establishment of full Jewish sovereignty over the Promised Land, the ingathering of the Jews to the Land, the rebuilding of the Temple and establishment of what we would call a Constitutional Monarchy, with the Torah as the Constitution. In Judaism, freedom and service are inseparable as the drama at Sinai showed and world peace is contingent upon the integrity and wholeness (shlaimut) of Israel which reflects the perfect Unity of G-d. 
While the gentile calendar runs its way along with decades, centuries and millennia defining themselves as they go or in retrospect per the notion that “man is the measure of all things,” the framework, though not the specifics of Jewish history are preset, simple but also foundational. Judaism posits six thousand years of human history based on the principle of one millennium for each of the six days of creation. A verse frequently cited as the allusion to this principle is “a thousand years in His eyes are but a bygone yesterday, and like a watch in the night” (psalm 90:4). These six thousand years are themselves divided in three periods of two thousand years each.
The three eras of human history are 1) Desolation; 2) Torah, 3) Moshiach
Desolation 0 – 2000 (Avraham, b.1948 [1812 bce] is 52 years old in 1760 bce);
Torah: 2000 -4000 holy time; 1760 BCE – 240 CE; Natan [”giving of”]Torah 1312 bce
Moshiach: 4000- ?; 240 – the 5th and 6th millennia with their terminus in the sixth, last and current millennium dependent on human deeds, within and around Israel.
We are living in the sixth and last millennial ‘day’ of history.
As is specified in the first chapter of Genesis, for Judaism a day and a millennial-day begins in darkness, its first half is evening and night. This is a metaphysical, ethical and eschatological principle: from chaos, order; from darkness, light; from confusion and evil, clarity and goodness. History not only has direction and purpose but this purpose is redemptive and very, very good. That is the Jewish idea.
So the first half of each millennial ‘day’ is five hundred years of darkness or ‘night,’ when the predators and creatures of night have dominion. Then there is a period of fifty years of dawn and sunrise until full day fills the final four hundred and fifty years of a millennial day. We are living in the last quarter of the sixth day, in the Erev Shabbat (hours before the Sabbath) of human history. The Messiah, a man like you or me will come when Israel as a nation has reached a level of understanding and practice that allows him to be recognized, heard and followed. Judaism is very sensible that way: it is not a superman or hero who will pull up the entire nation by himself or some magic trick or powers; rather the spiritual and social status of the nation will enable Moshiach, who is present in every generation and every day to fulfill his role, to be heard and lead to sovereignty, restoration, ingathering and integrity in every sense.
The Hebrew calendar provides insights into human history and cultural development of great value to all who ponder them. Some interesting and key points are that the calling of Avraham to leave his idol-making father’s home and native land for “the land that I will show you” began the era of Torah. Its five hundred years of night (think of the “predatory birds” that threatened the sacrifice Avraham laid out when the Creator promised him the entire boundaries of the Land forever, Genesis 15:9-18) and then the ‘dawn’ of the era of Torah at 1312 BCE (2500 holy time) when all of Israel, “those of you who are standing here today and those of you who are not standing here today” (Deut. 30) at Mt. Sinai. The entire people “saw the sound,” the Hebrew letters that are the building blocks and ‘DNA’ of everything that exists, shining through all matter that became transparent to them. The soul roots of every Jew, converts too, were there.
Remember the foundational principle that human thoughts, words and deeds affect the nature and timing of redemption. We can have Geula b’ita (”in its time,” in due course, slowly and painfully) or achishena (hastened, “like the clouds of heaven”) depending on the degree to which we turn to the Source and truly yearn and act to settle Israel in its place and attune it to hear the Jewish Messiah, not a god-man, “but a man like every one of us with a father and a mother” (Rambam; Sforno); like David and Solomon and Zerubavel (Zechariah 3:3 ff).
Every day begins in darkness and comes to light; so with each millennium of history…
There is another natural principle that accords with the orderly and rational quality of the creation that bears on the timing of redemption in Jewish thought, a down-to-earth appreciation of the energy and force that make time. Call it the ‘wave principle.’ Long before modern science, Jews understood that energy, the primal substance of creation behaves sometimes like matter and sometimes like a wave. One can see this in the topography of earth and also the ‘topography’ of history. Thus, the formative events of an era begin before its calendar date, build up, crest and crash like a wave leaving their imprint on the ‘beach’ of culture and taking time to swirl away and gather the material and energy for the next wave. Abraham’s early life was the building wave of Torah that engraved the world 500 years after his birth, at dawn of the era of Torah: out of darkness, light.
Similarly, the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE (3830 holy time) preceded by 170 years the era of Moshiach. Not surprising: even after destruction of the Temple, despite mass murder of Jews, the enslavement and deportations, there still was a large Jewish majority in the land and the Sanhedrin continued to meet. There still were two major wars of independence against Rome (117-18 and 132-38) to be fought; and the Mishna was being actively studied and codified. By 240, when the era of Moshiach began by the calendar, Rav Yehudah haNasi had completed the redaction of the Mishna (”oral records”), the land was being wasted, and while there still was a Jewish majority and Jewish land ownership (the basis of the Sabbatical Year and the Jubilee — the inalienable landholding of each Jewish family, tithes, social integrity) the level of sanctity of the land was being eroded along with its fertility, its Jewish population and sages whom the Romans hunted down and murdered for centuries.
Early in the night of the first of the two millennial days of the era of Moshiach, the Sanhedrin was disbanded. A little more than two years ago (Tishrei 5765/October 2004) it was re-established, however tentatively. Spiritual and cultural plates are shifting…
Interestingly, when Jews ceased to be a majority in the land and the Eastern (Byzantine) empire seized Jewish title to the land, the original, Western Roman Empire, based in Rome, the destroyer of the Promised Land, was falling into ruin. The “night” of the fifth millennial day was underway and deepening. It witnessed the final breaking of Jewish power in the land as the Greeks and Persians fought over it (a Jewish legion actually re-conquered Jerusalem in 4734 holy time; 614 CE) and the subsequent eruption into the vacuum of the Arabs with consequences still shaking the world. This night of the first part of the era of Moshiach also saw the widespread migrations, conquests and disorder of the Germans, Vikings and Huns, a total collapse of civilization following upon the destruction of Judah and the era of Torah.
With the sunrise and day of the fifth millennium, its ‘manlike creatures’ emerged: western civilization pulled itself together and quickly showed its stripes, inherited from Esau in producing blood libels, Crusades and wholesale burning of Jewish communtiies and the slaughter of Jews in Eretz Yisrael including all the Jews in Jerusalem by the First Crusade. It was a harbinger of the wave of the third and last historical era.
The ‘night’ of the sixth and last millennial day (began 5000 holy time, 1240 CE) saw the expulsions of Jews from European nations (England 1290; France 1306; Spain and Portugal, 1492, 1497) the latter spreading the Jewish diaspora throughout the world, from Poland and Russia to Perua, shaken as from a sieve as Jeremiah had prophecied. The night of this last day saw the emergence of England as the intellectually and militarily dominant European power and the growth in it of dissenting sects that had a bond and fondness for the Hebrew Scriptures unique in history: these were the Puritans who brought there values, based in the Tanach to the New World and the gracious nation they created there: the first and only Western nation that did not begin as pagan but Scriptual-based, a non-denominational christian nation with an uniqe closeness to and acceptance of Jews.
As the Ayn Sof states of the Children of Israel: “those who bless you I will bless; those who curse you, I will curse.”
As sunrise led into day in the sixth millennium, England was at war almost constantly in the New World (1740-63; 1775-83; 1812-15) and, strikingly, in the year, 1790 when ‘full day’ arrived, George Washington was serving his first year as first President of America. The full day of the last millennium by the Jewish calendar - sense of history is the ‘day’ of America… and of the ingathering of Israel. What a tragedy, what a terrible and unnecessary lengthening of redemption b’ita (”in its time”) that the elites that rule America have passed from “restorationism” (a desire to restore Jews to settlement and sovereignty in the Promised Land) to the Road Map that demands their uprooting and dividing of the Land, the two related acts that the Eternal One will never forgive (Joel 4).
And with America continuing to arm and train Fatah whose origins are in the shoah and the link of the Nazis with the “Arab Higher Committee” it seems that humankind indeed is heading for the “Valley of Hashem’s Judgment.” Who’s writing this script? In any case, the framework of the Jewish sense of history reveals many significant patterns bearing fruits in our days.
The brilliance of Hebrew and thus of Scriptures is not only that all its concepts grow from three-letter roots, but that it is a numeric code. We live in the fifty-eighth century by the Hebrew calendar and fifty-eight is the numeric value of the Hebrew word for “grace” (cheyn, the root of Chanukka, “dedication”). This century began in early September 1939, the time that Hisstler chose for his neo-pagan crusade to exterminate the people who are the portion of the Creator. Human thoughts and deeds have great ability to form or deform as that decade of tribulation so fiercely showed.
The bitter coincidence of timing underscores not only the genocidal mockery of the nations but the enormous impact of human freedom and its consequences, of the Jewish understanding that every moment and time, not least those of particular significance have the potential to be realized or turned into their opposites. And indeed the fifty-eighth century and entire ‘day’ of the sixth millennium has witnessed extremes of redemption and murderous spite. The neo-paganism and ferocious violence of the French Revolution; the growth and decline of America from within as its Jew-hating elites corrode its grace; the campaign against Judaism and massive kidnapping of Jewish boys in Czarist Russia; the wholesale murder of Jews in Russia during and after WWI; the British betrayal of the League of Nations Mandate to create the Jewish National Home in all of what today is “Jordan” and Israel, a betrayal that made the shoah possible with British diplomats insisting throughout WW II that NO Jews be allowed out of Europe to “Palestine.” The invention of the non-historical fiction that there is a “Palestinian people” when ‘Palestina’ was a Latin word and name that the pagan Romans gave to Judea in mockery. The malice of Esau lives on and threatens to overwhelm America…
And now, in the Erev Shabbat of history, the last quarter of the sixth millennium (5750 holy time = 1990) the Madrid/Oslo - Road Map scheme to abolish the Creator’s plan and abort the mission He assigned to His people and portion, Israel.
On the redemptive side of the ledger is the resettlement (achieving irreversible momentum as the sunrise of the sixth ‘day’ of history began early in the 18th century CE, for example with the arrival of Rav Chaim Attar and his congregation) of Israel by the Jews, making the land, desolated so long as its people were mostly gone, blossom again; and the establishment of a Jewish state, however limited and minimally Jewish in orientation. A nation whose potential might is clear in ways great and small but whose leaders display the “pettiness and hypocrosies,” the “arrogance” and denial of identity that brings crisis after crisis: “disasters will surge like a river”; ”the peoples of the borders will be displaced and the Galilee will be devestated” (Sanhedrin 97a-98).
Apropos that text, the Jews deported from Gush Katif, and all the faithful of the land indeed are “a humble and a forebearing people.”
Another aspect of Judaism’s down-to-earth wisdom about even the great sweep and destiny of the human family is that it likens the last of the three eras of history to a pregnancy that as it proceeds is characterized by birth pangs of increasing frequency and strength. These are difficult and painful but ultimately fruitful, producing from their stress the greatest blessing of all. So it will be the the Moshiach and the establishment of a Torah-Consitutional Monarchy and full sovereignty in Israel. As Jeremiah said, hearing the Eternal One consoling the soul of Rachel, “restrain your eyes from weeping… your children will return to their borders,” verses sung by the Jewish people to this day even on the sites of the newly ruined homes.
Redemption will happen; it’s up to all of us to see that it arrives as joyously, soon and with as little pain as possible. This is our responsbility and the dignity of our freedom.
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The following partial chronology is provided at the request of some readers who desired to review some salient events of the third and last era of human history. I hope you will find it a useful study tool.
1675 Charles II of England creates first fiat money and legal tender laws
1670–1815 Britain at war almost continually in Europe and North America
1694 Creation of Bank of England, debt-financing & unsupported paper money [destruction of Torah principles of fair weights & measures; human beings disregard laws of creation: National Banks creating out of nothing, aping the Eternal, increasing olam tohu, “world of chaos”]
1740 sunrise of ‘day’ of 6th millennium: British begin employing German mercenaries
1740-63, 1775-83, 1812-15 British wars in North America
1736 – growing aliyah of Chassidim to the Land
1760-95 destruction of Poland & its annexation [including the lands of the four semi-autonomous Jewish states] by Prussia, Austria and Russia
1795-1917 routine kidnappings & murders of Jews in Russia; war against Judaism
1790 destruction of the gold-backed bank of Amsterdam by speculation
1791-3, Reign of Terror in France promoting return to paganism
1781-1913, ongoing struggles in America against the tyranny of paper money unsupported by “fair weights & measures” (actual gold or silver reserves), against governing by debt
1796-1801, Napoleon hints at restoring Judea & rebuilding Temple [doesn’t]; resists fiat money
1813, Napoleon destroys last European Bank based on true weights & measures
1790-1939 assimilation of most Jews in Western Europe
1850-70, Prussia unifies German states via economic union & wars with neighbors
19th century, increasing secularism, invention of social ‘sciences’ & Biblical “new criticism”
19th century, steady growth of American & British Zionism
1913 – Rockefeller, Carnegie foundations support ‘eugenics’ (population control & reduction) feminism, sexual perversion, women in the workplace, debt financing & world state
1920, British granted mandate to “establish Jewish National Home” and “to facilitate Jewish immigration and settlement of the land”; led covertly by Churchill, they betray this mandate.
1922, Brits sever Gilead from Jewish National Home & promote Arab attacks on Jews; Henry Ford publishes & promotes “the International Jew”
1929, unsupported currency & loans support speculation, ‘Sodom,’ & the Crash/ flood; British invite Arabs to slaughter Jewish community of Hebron & deport the survivors
1938, British appease Hissler at Munich; Nazis perpetrate Kristallnacht
1938, led by British & America, world decides there are no places of refuge for European Jews
1939, Hissler mocks ‘century of grace’ by starting neo-pagan crusade; begins shoah: British issue “White Paper” banning Jewish immigration into Eretz Israel [unless Arabs approve]; British appointee Amin al Husseini goes to Berlin to make radio broadcasts promoting shoah; founds the forerunner of Fatah with German assistance; 700 years since “Holy Roman [German] Empire”
1941-5, pressed by England & State Department, all initiatives to rescue Jews are buried; Jews striving to facilitate Jewish immigration are arrested and hanged by the British; British appointee, Amin al Husseini works with Hitler to form Islamic SS divisions and insure Final Solution.
1945, Allies arrest al Husseini in Germany; put into “Safe house,” he escapes via France to Egypt; from his Arab Higher Committee forms Fatah, urges war on Israel and extermination of Jews; lives mostly in Egypt till his death in 1974
1946, British create “Transjordan” from the Gilead
November 1947, Pope denounces & refuses to recognize tiny & attacked Israeli nation
1948, British equipped, trained and led armies of Transjordan & Iraq conquer Judea and Samaria, expel all Jews and destroy old city of Jerusalem and Hebron.
1945-ff, CIA built around a core of thousands of former Nazis and collaborators.
1951, Europe begins economic & political unification dominated by Germany & France; Americans subsidize it, EEC, EC, EU
1956, after 9 years of Egyptian attacks, Israel conquers Sinai; Eisenhower compels Israel to withdraw, ‘guarantees’ peaceful borders
1960s, French under de Gaulle become increasingly pro-Arab & anti-Israel
1967, Israel re-conquers Judea & Samaria, defeats Arab armies equipped by Britain & Russia
1969, America & Britain begin pushing “[Jewish] land for [fake] peace”
1973, Syria and Egypt, armed by Russia attack Israel on Yom Kippur; Israel recovers all land; American diplomats press it immediately to ceasefire and withdraw from vital areas at Suez and outskirts of Damascus
1975, Jimmy Carter begins promoting “national rights for the Palestinian people” [sic]
1977-80, Pres. Carter engineers “Camp David Accords” by which Israel surrenders the entire Sinai Peninsula and all they had built there in exchange for promises. In 1980 to the New York Times, Anwar Sadat derides these promises as “a piece of paper,” Hitler’s own terminology about peace agreements, similar to Islamic concept of hudna.
1980-1, Israel learns that American and French diplomats and intelligence have hidden from it Iraqi plans for nuclear weapons to use against Israel. June 1981, Israel destroys Iraq’s reactor.
1982, After decades of murderous attacks from Jordan and Lebanon, Israel invades Lebanon to destroy the PLO. America intervenes, forces Israel to withdraw and save Arafat and PLO. America puts a token ‘peace-keeping’ force into Beirut.
1983, PLO, Hizbollah bomb and murder hundreds of Americans in Beirut; America withdraws.
1984 – AIDS begins to ravage America; popular media become a sewer of depravity and lies
1984-2005, Syria occupies Lebanon and turns it into a colony.
1990, Madrid Conference demands that Israel surrender most of Judea and Samaria; blackmail of PM Shamir by President G.H.W. Bush and James A. Baker. Erev Shabbat of history begins.
1992-5, Oslo Accords create numerous jihadist ‘free zones’ in Judea and Samaria.
1993, first jihadist attempt to bring down the WTC
1996, Jihadists blow up TWA 800 over Long Island; Clinton administration cover-up; ongoing
1997, President Clinton forces PM Netanyahu to withdraw from 80% of Hebron. Jews left with a ghetto of about 10% in the oldest Jewish city in the world.
1998, Osama bin Laden declares war on America
Sept-October 2000, Arabs begin second ‘intifada-war’ against Jews in Israel, on Rosh Hashanah
2001, George W. Bush government declares that Jews must not build anywhere in Judea and Samaria
9/11/01, Jihadists destroy WTC and attack Pentagon; Administration minimizes Saudi links, calls Islam, “a religion of peace” and declares, “the Saudis are our friends.”
Fall 2000- spring 2005, Arabs rain mortars on Jews of Gush Katif, flouishing farms built from sand dunes
August 2005, Jews expelled from Gush Katif-Gerar and northern Samaria; Katrina hits America
July-August 2006, Iran attacks Israel via rocket bombardments by Hizballah, branch of the Iranian Republican Guard. State Dept, EU and UN press Israel to ceasefire; blame Jews for violence
Nov. 2006, Secretary of State Rice declares it would be “the greatest fulfillment of America’s promise” to create a Palestinian State in Judea and Samaria.
Dec. 2006, ISG – Baker report insists problems in Mesopotamia can be solved by creating a “Palestinian State” in Judea and Samaria and permitting Arab “right of return.”
Jan. 2007, Iranian nuclear program believed within months of bomb capability.