Sanhedrin 099

Mishnah Five was concerned with one who copulates with his mother, with his father's wife, a male with another male, with an animal or a woman who copulates with an animal; Mishnah Six was concerned with the act of sacrilege; Mishnah Seven was concerned with the offence of idolatry; Mishnah Eight was concerned with the worship of the Molekh and two of the offences connected with the occult.

Thus so far nine of the eighteen offences have been itemized and elaborated upon. Our present mishnah adds two more: Sabbath desecration and cursing a parent.

2:
Our present mishnah obviously consists of a Reisha [first section] and a Seifa [last section]. The Reisha deals with desecration of the Sabbath and the Seifa is concerned with the fate of one who utters and imprecation against a parent.

3:
Shabbat is the most important of all the Jewish holy days, and it is intrinsically different from all the others. Despite the fact that all the major festivals are instituted by the Torah, which also stipulates when they are to be observed, the actual time when the festivals are celebrated is decided by human beings: since the calendar is regulated by human intervention, it is human beings who ultimately decide when even such an important day as Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is to fall. When the Sanhedrin was still active, it was that august body that decided when the new moon had been sighted – and that fact regulated the exact timing of all the festivals falling during that month.

This is illustrated by the well-known incident described by the Mishnah in Tractate Rosh ha-Shanah, Chapter Two, mishnayot 8-9. The Sanhedrin, under the presidency of Rabban Gamli'el, had accepted that two people had witnessed the new moon and had declared the new month accordingly. The following night the moon was yet to be seen (which suggested that the evidence had been misleading and that the new month should not have started yet). Rabbi Dosa ben-Hyrkanos said that it was obvious that the witnesses were in error: "How can you give evidence that a woman has given birth when the following day her belly is still as large as ever?" Rabbi Yehoshu'a said, "I am afraid that you are right". Rabban Gamli'el then retorted, "I order you to appear before me on Yom Kippur according to your reckoning with your walking staff and your money!" Rabbi Yehoshu'a was persuaded to act against his conscience by the exposition of Rabbi Akiva, who demonstrated that the "correct" date for the festivals is when Israel has declared them to fall.

None of this applies to Shabbat, which is, as we have already stated, intrinsically different from all the other holy days. Whatever Israel – or any other people – might do with or to the calendar, every seventh day from eternity to eternity is God's Shabbat. (When the League of Nations was toying with an idea for the reform of the calendar that would have involved Shabbat slipping back during the days of the week, it was the Jews who lobbied for the shelving of the idea.)

4:
Shabbat does not commemorate any historic event: it commemorates a meta-historical event, an "event" that took place before history began, as it were. Shabbat commemorates the very Creation of the Universe. If we had been studying forty years ago I would have had to write in a semi-apologetic tone: it was by no means universally accepted that the physical universe had a beginning! In 1964 the Bell Telephone Laboratory was in possession of an unusual radio antenna on Crawford Hill at Holmdel, New Jersey, USA. The antenna had been built for communication via the Echo satellite, but its characteristics – a 20-foot horn reflector with ultralow noise – made it a promising instrument for radio astronomy. A pair of radio astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, set out to use the antenna to measure the intensity of the radio waves emitted from our galaxy at high galactic latitudes, i.e. out of the plane of the Milky Way. Penzias and Wilson were mystified by the presence of a microwave noise that "shouldn't have been there". (At first it was thought that the droppings of a pair of pigeons that had been roosting in the antenna throat were responsible. The pigeons were caught, mailed to the Bell Laboratories' Whippany site, released, found back in the antenna at Holmdel a few days later, caught again and finally discouraged by more decisive means. But even after a thorough cleaning up of their "white dielectric material" the noise persisted.) The meaning of the mysterious microwave noise soon began to be clarified through the operation of the "invisible college" of astrophysicists. Penzias happened to telephone a fellow astronomer, Bernard Burke of MIT, about other matters. Burke had just heard from yet another colleague, Ken Turner of the Carnegie Institution, of a talk that Turner had in turn heard at Johns Hopkins, given by a young theorist from Princeton, PJE Peebles. In this talk Peebles argued that there ought to be a background of radio noise left over from the early universe… We can cut a long story short. It was soon recognized that the noise that Penzias and Wilson had "heard" was a kind of echo of the Big Bang that marked the creation of this physical universe. I would be very surprised if Penzias and Wilson were aware that they were making theological history, but the claim of the Torah had now been given scientific corroboration: this universe was not eternal but created.

5:
According to the Torah Shabbat was instituted by God long before Israel ever existed. Shabbat marked the completion of the creation of the physical universe. Every week, when we recite Kiddush, we declare that

To be continued.