Understanding The Jewish Calendar

Time is fundamental to the human experience, and in Judaism it is even more—time is sanctified. Understanding the Jewish calendar is thus essential for fully comprehending Judaism. In From Time to Time, Rabbi Dalia Marx, PhD, presents a fascinating exploration of the treasures of the Jewish year. The book artfully blends traditional and contemporary perspectives on each Hebrew month and its holidays. Rabbi Marx's insights are paired with striking illustrations; each month also features a diverse selection of poetry, prayers, and songs. Taking a distinctively Israeli, feminist, and progressive approach, From Time to Time is a comprehensive, indispensable companion you will want to return to each season. I have no doubt that this new book will contribute a great deal to the global Jewish cultural field, offering Dalia Marx's evocative and singular voice of insight and wisdom to the interpretation of our Jewish calendar, and greatly enriching the ongoing and vital conversation that is our Jewish heritage with Jews around the world. —Isaac Herzog, President of the State of Israel Dalia Marx's brilliant book From Time to Time offers extraordinary new ways of understanding Jewish time. With poetry, ancient and modern texts, ritual suggestions, and historical reflections, Marx illuminates traditional holidays, features lesser-known celebrations such as Moroccan Mimouna and Ethiopian Sigd, and brings an evolved scholarship that includes feminist, pluralist, and gender-fluid perspectives. This rich tapestry allows us not only to learn more about the expanded Israeli calendar, but about Jewish views of time across the world and the centuries. This indispensable volume will help every one of us make our time more meaningful and sacred. —Rabbi Angela Warnick Buchdahl, Senior Rabbi, Central Synagogue, NYC This is, quite simply, a genius of a book, not just the best of its kind but the only thing of its kind: a moving combination of scholarly depth and mastery of Jewish tradition---served up with personal anecdote, poetic sensitivity, and an uncanny ability to make the seasons, the holidays, and even ordinary time come alive with meaning. —Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, PhD, Professor Emeritus, Hebrew Union College--Jewish Institute of Religion "God's glory is the human being fully alive," declared Saint Irenaeus of Lyon. Rabbi Dalia Marx's book offers a vade mecum for human flourishing. Her expansive compendium opens horizons on Israeli Jewish cultures and religious expressions---and takes readers beyond that world. From Time to Time is an evocative read, a splendid resource, and a powerful reminder that the diverse ways in which humans ritualize our longings and seek meaning connect us across boundaries of difference. —Sr. Mary C. Boys, Professor, Union Theological Seminary This book is a delightful and insightful road map for Jewish time travel, helping modern readers navigate the deeper meanings of each moment and season on the Jewish calendar. Rabbi Marx makes sacred time accessible and exciting through a fusion of historical clarity, cultural diversity, and contemporary relevance, revealing the essence of our ever-evolving traditions. —Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, Founding Spiritual Leader, Lab/Shul If, as Rabbi Heschel once said, our Sabbaths are cathedrals in time, Rabbi Dalia Marx has constructed a wonderland of the entire Jewish calendar. Her poetic imagination ranges across text and time, from Israel to Diaspora, across gender and geography and liturgy. This gorgeous book will be indispensable for those trying to find their way through the Jewish calendar, and also for those who may already live the Jewish calendar, yet seek to find themselves more deeply within it. —Dahlia Lithwick, Senior Editor, Slate The book's intellectual depth is balanced by an accessible writing style that successfully engages lay readers with applications to contemporary life, including prayers for schoolchildren and families. This emphasis on accessibility is reflected in the book's ample appendices, which include a glossary and a diagram of the Hebrew calendar year. While Marx's perceptive analysis is the star, this book is also a visually stunning volume, full of text-box vignettes, gorgeous illuminations, and other decorative flairs, as well as frequent parallel texts juxtaposing Hebrew scripture with English translations. This work is a welcome reminder of King David's adage to "count our days rightly...that we may obtain a wise heart." A brilliant introduction to the Jewish calendar that's both visually and intellectually striking. — Kirkus Reviews

Offers prayers, sources, rituals, and stories to help understand and celebrate the Jewish holidays.

Offers prayers, sources, rituals, and stories to help understand and celebrate the Jewish holidays.

Calendars map time, shaping and delineating our experience of it. While the challenges to tracking Jewish conceptions of time during the Holocaust were substantial, Alan Rosen reveals that many took great risks to mark time within that vast upheaval. Rosen inventories and organizes Jewish calendars according to the wartime settings in which they were produced—from Jewish communities to ghettos and concentration camps. The calendars he considers reorient views of Jewish circumstances during the war and show how Jews were committed to fashioning traditional guides to daily life, even in the most extreme conditions. In a separate chapter, moreover, he elucidates how Holocaust-era diaries sometimes served as surrogate Jewish calendars. All in all, Rosen presents a revised idea of time, continuity, the sacred and the mundane, the ordinary and the extraordinary even when death and destruction were the order of the day. Rosen’s focus on the Jewish calendar—the ultimate symbol of continuity, as weekday follows weekday and Sabbath follows Sabbath—sheds new light on how Jews maintained connections to their way of conceiving time even within the cauldron of the Holocaust.

Poetry. LGBT Studies. "A work of rich clear sensual language, of 'thermal tremble and juice,' these poems and photos pull the weaver's threads together, bring focus to 'wherein we can be a root to the sea.' Sinewy lines are constantly 'quoting my biology back to me as vow' and display a 'multi-creative musculature' we desperately need and desire. j/j is the real deal, reclaiming a space for engendered anarchy, opening Pandora's secret treasure trove, playing with fire, sound and love"—Anne Waldman.

Time Astronomy, and Calendars in the Jewish Tradition, edited by Sacha Stern and Charles Burnett, presents a wide selection of original research in the multi-disciplinary field of astronomy and calendars, from Antiquity to the late Middle Ages.

A survey of the sacred days of the Jewish yearly cycle providing detailed guidance on observing the Sabbath and the Jewish holidays, including Yom Ha-shoah (Holocaust Day) and Yom Ha-Atsmaut (Israeli Independence Day). Provides historical background, essays, a 25-year calendar of holidays, extensive notes, bibliography, glossary and index.