Shabbat HaChodesh: The Beginning of Months and the Month of Redemption

The reading and the haftarah

On Shabbat HaChodesh two scrolls are taken out: the weekly portion is read from the first, and Exodus 12:1–20 from the second as maftir. When Rosh Chodesh Nisan falls on Shabbat, three scrolls are used: the weekly portion, the Rosh Chodesh offerings (Numbers 28:9–15), and then Exodus 12:1–20.²

The haftarah comes from Ezekiel’s vision of the restored Temple: Ezekiel 45:16–46:18 in Ashkenazi communities, and 45:18–46:15 in Sephardi communities.³ When Shabbat HaChodesh coincides with Rosh Chodesh, many communities add the first and last verses of the Rosh Chodesh haftarah from Isaiah 66, ending with the promise that “from one new moon to another” all flesh will come to worship.

“This month shall be unto you”

And Hashem spake unto Moshe and Aharon in the land of Egypt, saying, This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you.

Several words carry weight.

“In the land of Egypt.” Almost every other commandment to Israel as a people was given at Sinai or in the wilderness. This one, the first, was given in Egypt, while Israel was still enslaved. Before they were free, Hashem gave them the means to measure time as free people. A slave’s time belongs to his master; a free people sanctifies its own days.

“This month.” The word chodesh (חודש) comes from chadash, “new.” A Hebrew month is a “renewal,” measured by the new moon. The midrash, quoted by Rashi, says that Moshe was puzzled about exactly what size of crescent marks the new month, and Hashem showed him the moon and said, “When you see it like this, sanctify it.”⁴

“Unto you.” Lachem, “to you,” is read by the sages as giving the authority to Israel: the sanctification of the month is entrusted to Israel’s court. We return to this below.

“The beginning of months.” The Torah names the months by number, counting from the month of the Exodus. Nisan is the first, Tishrei the seventh (Leviticus 23:24). The Mishnah resolves the apparent tension with Rosh Hashanah by teaching that there are several “new years”: 1 Nisan is the new year “for kings and for festivals,” while 1 Tishrei is the new year for years, sabbatical years and jubilees.⁵ The annual cycle of creation and judgment turns in Tishrei; the history of Israel’s redemption, and the order of the pilgrimage feasts, begins in Nisan.

The rest of the reading (12:3–20) lays out the Passover: the lamb taken on the tenth (see Shabbat HaGadol), slaughtered on the fourteenth, its blood on the doorposts, its meat eaten in haste with matzah and bitter herbs, and seven days without leaven, “an ordinance for ever” (12:14, 17). For the feast itself, see Pesach.

The first mitzvah to Israel

Rashi’s commentary on the Torah famously begins not with creation but with a question about this very verse. Rabbi Yitzchak said: the Torah, which is a book of commandments for Israel, should have begun with “This month shall be unto you,” the first commandment Israel was given. Why, then, does it begin with “In the beginning God created”? Because “He hath shewed His people the power of His works, that He may give them the heritage of the heathen” (Psalm 111:6). If the nations accuse Israel of stealing the Land, Israel can answer that the whole earth belongs to the Holy One; He created it and gives it to whom He pleases.⁶

The comment does two things at once. It honors Exodus 12:2 as the beginning of Israel’s life under commandment, and it insists that this national story rests on the universal story of creation. Israel’s calendar begins in Egypt, but Israel’s God is the Creator of heaven and earth.

Nisan: the month of redemption

The Talmud records a debate between Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua about when the world was created and when the final redemption will come. Rabbi Yehoshua taught: “In Nisan they were redeemed, and in Nisan they will be redeemed in the future.”⁷ Rabbi Eliezer held that the future redemption will come in Tishrei. Both positions express hope rather than a calculation, and the sages warned sternly against those who calculate the end.⁸ But Rabbi Yehoshua’s teaching gave Nisan its character as the month in which Israel’s hope is renewed with the spring.

Nisan is also the month in which the Mishkan, the Tabernacle in the wilderness, was raised. Hashem commanded Moshe, “On the first day of the first month shalt thou set up the tabernacle” (Exodus 40:2), and “it came to pass in the first month in the second year, on the first day of the month, that the tabernacle was reared up” (40:17). The Talmud says that this day “took ten crowns”: it was the first day of creation (that is, a Sunday), the first day of the princes’ offerings (Numbers 7), the first day of the priesthood, the first of the sacrificial service, the first time fire came down from heaven on the altar, the first time holy offerings were eaten, the first time the Shechinah dwelt in Israel, the first time the priests blessed Israel, the first day on which private altars were forbidden, and the first of the months.⁹ Many communities read the offerings of the twelve princes (Numbers 7) on the first twelve days of Nisan, one prince each day, and avoid eulogies and private fasts through the month because of its joy.¹⁰

Sanctifying the month: the court and the calendar

In the days of the Sanhedrin, the new month was not determined by a printed table but by testimony. Witnesses who had seen the new crescent came to Jerusalem, were examined by the court, and when their testimony was accepted the head of the court declared, “It is sanctified!” and all the people answered, “It is sanctified, it is sanctified!”¹¹ Messengers, and in earlier times signal fires on the mountaintops, carried the news to the communities of Israel and the diaspora.

The Mishnah tells a famous story about the authority of that court. Rabban Gamliel, the head of the court, accepted testimony that Rabbi Yehoshua thought was false, and so the two disagreed about the day on which Yom Kippur would fall. Rabban Gamliel ordered Rabbi Yehoshua to come to him with his staff and his money on the day that, by Rabbi Yehoshua’s reckoning, was Yom Kippur. Rabbi Akiva comforted him by showing from the Torah that the festivals are those that the court proclaims: “These are the feasts of Hashem, holy convocations, which ye shall proclaim in their seasons” (Leviticus 23:4). Rabbi Yehoshua went, and Rabban Gamliel rose, kissed him on the head, and said, “Come in peace, my teacher and my student.”¹² The Talmud adds that the word “ye” (atem) is written three times in these passages, and reads it as “even if you err, even deliberately, even if misled”: what the court sanctifies is sanctified.¹³

The lesson for Benei Avraham is direct. The appointed times are Hashem’s, but He entrusted the reckoning of them to Israel’s authorities, not to each individual with a telescope. After the Sanhedrin could no longer meet, the calculated calendar now in use took its place. Tradition attributes its publication to Hillel II in the fourth century; the earliest explicit attribution comes from Rav Hai Gaon, as cited in the twelfth century, and historians think the system was completed gradually over the following centuries.¹⁴ Either way, it is the calendar of the Jewish people, and we keep the feasts on its dates. Yeshua kept the feasts on the dates Israel kept them, and “the scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moshe’s seat” (Matthew 23:2).

The haftarah: the Prince and the restored service

Ezekiel 45–46 belongs to the prophet’s great vision of a restored Temple and land (Ezekiel 40–48). The haftarah describes offerings provided by “the prince” (ha-nasi) “in the feasts, and in the new moons, and in the sabbaths” (45:17). It continues with a purification of the sanctuary on the first day of the first month (45:18), the Passover on the fourteenth (45:21), and the feast of the seventh month (45:25). Then it describes the inner east gate, shut on the six working days but “on the sabbath it shall be opened, and in the day of the new moon it shall be opened” (46:1), and the people of the land bowing at that gate before Hashem “in the sabbaths and in the new moons” (46:3). When the people come in by one gate, they leave by the opposite one, “and the prince in the midst of them” (46:9–10).

These chapters troubled the sages, because several of Ezekiel’s offerings differ from those of the Torah. The Talmud records that Chananiah ben Chizkiyah burned three hundred jars of oil working late into the night to reconcile Ezekiel with the Torah, and so saved the book for the canon.¹⁵ Of one passage in this very haftarah, the purification on the first of Nisan (45:18), Rabbi Yochanan said, “Eliyahu will explain it in the future.”¹⁶ The sages accepted that some things will be clear only when the restored Temple stands.

Messianic: shadows and the fullness of time

Colossians 2:16–17 in context

Shabbat HaChodesh is a fitting time to read one of the most misused verses in the Brit Hadashah (the New Testament):

Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Messiah.

The verse is often read as declaring the festivals, new moons and Shabbat obsolete. Read in context, it is not so simple. Paul is warning against “philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world” (2:8), against “worshipping of angels” (2:18), and against ascetic rules, “Touch not; taste not; handle not” (2:21). Several scholars have argued that the people “judging” the Colossian believers were outsiders; Troy Martin, for example, argued that ascetic Cynic critics were scorning the believers’ festive eating and drinking and their keeping of festivals, new moons and Shabbat, and that Paul tells them not to let anyone condemn them for it.¹⁷ On this reading, the verse defends their keeping of the appointed times.

Two details in the text support caution. First, Paul says these things “are” (present tense) “a shadow of things to come”; a shadow cast by something still to come is not abolished, it points forward. Second, the word “is” in “the body is of Messiah” is supplied by translators; the Greek can be read as “but [let] the body of Messiah [judge],” that is, the community. Whichever reading one prefers, the new moon is presented as a picture of what is coming in Messiah, not as a sin to be avoided. The prophets agree, as we will see.

“When the fullness of the time was come”

Paul writes elsewhere, “But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the Torah” (Galatians 4:4). Shabbat HaChodesh is about Hashem’s time: He sets the months, appoints the seasons, and acts in history at the moment He has chosen. Yeshua was born a Jew “under the Torah,” circumcised on the eighth day, and kept Israel’s calendar. The Father who said “This month shall be unto you” also chose the hour to send His Messiah, and has fixed a day for his return that no one knows (Mark 13:32).

Prophetic: from one new moon to another

The Prince of Ezekiel’s vision is a figure of the restored age, ruling among the people and providing for the worship of Hashem. Jewish commentators have understood him in various ways, as the king of Israel in the messianic age or as a leader under him; Ezekiel elsewhere calls the coming Davidic ruler “My servant David … prince among them” (Ezekiel 34:24; 37:25). Notably, Ezekiel’s prince brings a sin offering “for himself and for all the people of the land” (45:22), which leads many interpreters, including many believers in Yeshua, to see him as a human ruler in the Messianic kingdom rather than the Messiah himself. The point that matters for this Shabbat is that in the restored age the new moons and Shabbatot are still kept, and the east gate opens on them.

Isaiah’s final chapter says the same, and its last verses are read on a Shabbat that coincides with Rosh Chodesh:

And it shall come to pass, that from one new moon to another, and from one sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to worship before Me, saith Hashem.

The calendar given to slaves in Egypt becomes, at the end, the calendar of “all flesh.” The nations, too, will come up to worship Hashem at His appointed times (compare Zechariah 14:16). Nisan, the first of months, marks not only the beginning of Israel’s story but the shape of its end: a redeemed people and redeemed nations keeping time together before the King. On the new moon of Nisan, see also Rosh Chodesh.

Keeping Shabbat HaChodesh

• Hear Exodus 12:1–20. Listen to the maftir as the announcement that Nisan, and Pesach, are near.
• Mark Rosh Chodesh Nisan. Bless the new month in the synagogue on Shabbat HaChodesh (when it is the Shabbat before), and consider reading Exodus 40 on 1 Nisan, the day the Mishkan was raised.
• Read the princes’ offerings. Following a widespread custom, read one prince’s offering from Numbers 7 on each of the first twelve days of Nisan.
• Take stock of your time. A free person sanctifies time. Ask what it would mean to order your days around Hashem’s appointed times.

See our calendar for this year’s dates.