I've Got the Sun in the Morning and the Moon at Night

The sun governs our lives.  We adjust our watches to the lengthened days at this time of year to compensate for more sunlight hours.  Later we will reset them.  Days are measured not only by the placement of the sun overhead but by its anticipated appearance.  For example, we call the midpoint between sunset and sunrise, midnight.

We adjust the years to the rotation of the earth around the sun using the “leap year” as a Band-Aid to remedy the true year of 365 1/4 days.  Otherwise, we would eventually end up with New Year’s Day being where Thanksgiving is now.

For ancient man, time was more easily calculated by observing changes in the celestial bodies.  Each evening the star change their positions ever so slightly.  Yet those slight changes enable us to grasp the passage of days and weeks and seasons.  The sun, however, remains basically the same.  The days grow warmer or colder but the brilliant orb does not radically shift its position.

In Judaism, time is marked by the waxing and waning of the moon.  While Jewish holy days always seem to come on different days each year, the always appear on the same days of the lunar cycle.  Rosh Hashanah, for example, always is marked by a new moon.  The Festival of Booths, Sukkot, falls when a full moon is visible in the heavens.

In this way, the seasons ebb and flow according to a lunar cycle which is both predictable and visible.  Interestingly, the eastern churches also celebrate the holiday of Easter using the same cycle, unlike their western counterparts, which have adopted the solar year as the yardstick for the passage of time.  For the eastern sects, Easter invariably coincide with Passover while most American churches celebrate the holiday on a consistent solar date.  And we know the solar calendar really makes our days slightly longer than twenty-four hours.  A complete revolution of the sun necessitates adding a full day to our calendar every four years.

Still, the moon, like the sun, is not a completely accurate measure of time either.  The moon revolves around our planet every twenty-five hours, not the twenty-four hours of the sun’s day.  Left alone for long stretches of time, spring would gradually slip into winter and winter into spring.  So, to keep our lunar calendar in “sync” with the solar calendar it too is adjusted every now and again.

When the moon catches up with the sun at the beginning of a new cycle (and it will do this approximately every twenty-nine days) we witness a “conjunction” or “new moon.”  When the old moon has faded away and yielded a new view of itself in the heavens, we celebrate a “Rosh Hodesh.”

A mystical quality hovers around the moon.  It is not unlike the shadow of our personalities.  To us, the moon appears to have strength all it sown.  Hence, we call someone under an unknown power, a lunatic or a looney.  But that too may be lunacy for the moon has no power of its own.

The sun casts its own light over the world while the moon is merely reflective.  The only reason we can see the moon at night is because it reflects the light of the sun on the other side of the earth and, like a mirror, returns it to us in the darkness.

The moon therefore becomes a paradigm for humanity.  Just as the Divine exists outside of us, each person is endowed with a reflective quality to mirror the brilliance of the Holy One, blessed be He.