Shabbat Hachodesh: Nation of Royalty – Part 1

 

Shabbat Hachodesh: Nation of Royalty

It is significant that our first national mitzvah was to take control of our time starting with the new year of kings.

Daniel Pinner

The Shabbat which either coincides with or immediately precedes Rosh Chodesh Nisan is Shabbat Hachodesh (Mishnah, Megillah 3:4, and cited as practical halakhah in the Mishneh Torah, Laws of Prayer 13:20, in the Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim 685:1-4, and in the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch 140:2).

The Maftir-reading for this Shabbat is Exodus 12:1-20:

“Hashem spoke to Moshe and to Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying: This month is the first of your months, it is the first of the months of your year…”. This constitutes a positive mitzvah that we sanctify the months and that the Sanhedrin calibrate our calendar (Ramban, Commentary to Exodus 12:2; Mishneh Torah, Enumeration of the Mitzvot, Positive Mitzvah #153, Laws of Sanctification of the Months 5:1; Sefer ha-Chinuch, Mitzvah #4).

Prior to this, G-d had already given our ancestors ten Mitzvot:

The first was the Mitzvah/blessing to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28), followed by the seven Noahide Mitzvot:

The prohibition against murder;

The prohibition against theft;

The prohibition against idolatry;

The prohibition against blasphemy;

The prohibition against sexual immorality;

The prohibition against eating a limb torn from an animal while the animal is still alive;

The obligation to establish courts of justice (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Kings 9:1).

These eight apply to the whole of mankind.

Then G-d gave our father Abraham the mitzvah of circumcision (Genesis 17:10-14), and to his grandson Jacob the prohibition against eating the sciatic nerve of any animal (Genesis 32:33).

So of these ten mitzvot, eight are universal, and the two exclusively Jewish mitzvot were given to individuals.

It is deeply significant that the first national mitzvah that G-d gave us, while still in Egypt on the very threshold of redemption, was to take control of our time:

A slave has scant need for a calendar: he sleeps and wakes, eats and works, lives his entire existence, according to his master’s timetable. Only a free person can determine his own schedule, and only a free nation can determine its own calendar.

The Mishnah (Rosh Hashanah 1:1) tells us that “There are four New Years: the first of Nisan is New Year for kings and for the Festivals; the first of Ellul is New Year for tithing animals, and Rabbi Elazar and Rabbi Shimon say it is on the first of Tishrei; the first of Tishrei is New Year for years, for the Shmitta-years, for the Jubilee years, for agriculture, and for vegetables; the first of Shevat is New Year for trees according to the School of Shammai, and the School of Hillel say on the fifteenth”.

If it is significant that our first national mitzvah was to take control of our time, it is more significant yet that the day which G-d designated as the beginning of our national year, the 1st of Nisan, is the New Year for Kings. Israel’s task in this world is to be G-d’s deputies and emissaries, to carry His message and to propagate it throughout humanity; to be G-d’s “Kingdom of Priests and holy nation” (Exodus 19:6).

Jewish history was waiting to burst forth.

Scant days earlier, as G-d smote Egypt with the Plague of Darkness (Exodus 10:21-23), all those Jews who rejected His redemption and preferred to remain in Egypt – fully four-fifths of the nation! – died in the darkness there, unseen by the Egyptians (vide Shemot Rabbah 14:3; Mechilta de-Rabbi Yishmael, Bo, Masechta de-Pis’cha 12; Tanchuma, Beshallach, and other Midrashim).

Those of the newly-liberated nation who survived were the minority who were worthy of redemption.

And as they stood teetering on the knife-edge between Egyptian slavery and their mission of holiness, G-d infused them with this most exalted and inspiring of concepts. As His Kingdom of Priests and holy nation, our national year begins on the New Year for Kings.

As G-d infused this magnificent and majestic identity into the nation at those critical moments of liberation, so we are to live perpetually – even in exile.

A century and a half ago, the great Zionist German-Jewish poet Ludwig August Frankl expressed this in his stirring poem “Juda’s Farben” (“Judah’s colours”):