The story of the Jewish calendar, which begins with the Exodus from Egypt, is more than thirty-five hundred years old. Over the millennia, the twelve individual Jewish tribes coalesced into the nation of Israel, adopting, adapting, and ultimately developing their own religious calendar, which has withstood the vagaries of the ages. At one time an observational calendar based on the visual sighting of the New Moon, the Jewish calendar is now a sophisticated calculated calendar based on average lunation time, while remaining true to its ancient past. A small council of rabbis guarded the secret instructions for constructing the calendar, until the mid-fourth century CE when, due to repressive acts and ultimate dissolution of the Jewish Court by Roman emperors, Hillel II, President of the Jewish Court in Babylonia, revealed those rules, so that Jews are able to construct their religious calendar. Today, those rules and how to apply them are, in general, neither well known, nor well understood. In The Jewish Calendar: History and Inner Workings, author and award-winning teacher Fred Reiss leads the reader through the history of the Jewish calendar and presents each of the rules, why they were developed, and what they mean. Using simple arithmetic, Reiss teaches how to apply those rules to make a Jewish calendar for any year, past, present, or future. In addition, he shows the associations and linkages among the calendar's various parts. The Jewish Calendar: History and Inner Workings answers such questions as: What is the definition of lunation time? Why have the rabbis condensed seven days into four days? Why is the High Holy Day of Rosh Hashanah often postponed? The civil calendar is either 365 or 366-days long, why does the Jewish calendar have six different year lengths? The Julian calendar repeats every twenty-eight years, the Gregorian calendar every four hundred years, why does it take 689,472 years for the Jewish calendar to repeat? All calendars have errors, what are the Jewish calendar's errors and what do they affect? Are there any ways to mitigate the errors? What are the steps for constructing a Jewish calendar? Each chapter ends with a review and a set of exercises, the answers to which are provided. The Jewish Calendar: History and Inner Workings reveals the structure, content, and interconnections within the calculated Jewish calendar in a format for the casual reader, or as a textbook for self-instruction. It is a valuable resource for understanding the complexity of the Jewish calendar.
About the Author: Dr. Fred Reiss is a retired, award winning public and Hebrew school teacher, administrator, and university adjunct instructor at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He is the author of The Standard Guide to the Jewish and Civil Calendars; Public Education in Camden, NJ: From Inception to Integration; Ancient Secrets of Creation: Sepher Yetzira, the Book that Started Kabbalah, Revealed; and a fiction book, Reclaiming the Messiah. He received his AB in physics from Rutgers University's College of Arts and Sciences, his M.Ed. in supervision and curriculum development from Rowan University, his MS in computer science from New Jersey Institute of Technology, and his Ed.D. in educational administration from Rutgers University's Graduate School of Education.