Berakhot 013

5:
In our mishnah Rabbi Eli'ezer disputes the definition given by Tanna Kamma [the anonymous author of the accepted view]; in his opinion the terminus a quo should be later, at a time when there is sufficient natural light to permit one to distinguish between blue and green – obviously more difficult than distinguishing between blue and white and requiring more light. Rabbi Eli'ezer was a shammuti, a follower of the school of Shammai, a school of opinion known to be generally more stringent than the majority school of Hillel. Rabbi Eli'ezer (Louis) Finkelstein z"l may be right in assuming that social and economic factors also distinguish the views of these two schools of halakhic thought, and the more 'bourgeois' school of Shammai might have risen later each morning than the more 'proletarian' school of Hillel.

6:
Rabbi Eli'ezer's statement in the mishnah also provides the bridge to the next item: the terminus ad quem [latest time] for reciting the Shema in the morning. He states that the recitation of the Shema must be completed by sunrise! His great colleague and protagonist, Rabbi Yehoshu'a, gives the most lenient view imaginable: the time for reciting the Shema, according to him, does not end until one quarter of daylight has elapsed. When Rabbi Yehoshu'a speaks of the 'third hour' he is speaking once again of a variable hour which equals one twelfth of the time on that day that elapses between sunrise and sunset. (On a hypothetical day where sunrise is at 6 am and sunset at 6 pm the third hour would end at 9 am.)

To be continued.

Ron Kaminsky has questions concerning Rambam's setting the earliest time for reciting the Shema in the morning at 72 minutes before sunrise. He writes:

This would mean that if we go by Rambam, when you are near the poles and the sun is up for, e.g., 23 hours of the day, one can recite the morning Shema 2.3 hours before sunrise. That is 1.3 hours before sunset of the previous day! When one recites the Shema after sunset in this situation, it is "ambiguous" as to whether he is fulfilling b^eshokhb^ekha or uv^ekumekha. Is it necessary for the person reciting Shema to consciously disambiguate? Did Rambam know about the behavior of sunrise and sunset near the poles? Perhaps you or someone of a historical bent can enlighten us as to when this phenomenon became common knowledge?

I respond:

I answered the halakhic situation involved here in a response to Rmy Landau in Berakhot 009. Following what I wrote there I do not think that the situation would be ambiguous. I think that the question concerning Rambam's astronomical knowledge is even more intriguing. Rambam lived in 12th century CE (1135-1204); he was thus a contemporary of King Richard I of England and (the mythical) Robin Hood. Since he precedes Copernicus, Kepler and company by several centuries it is natural to think that his astronomical knowledge must have been pre-modern. However, this is not the case, since the 'dark ages' were only the lot of western (Christian) civilization; in the east the Moslem world had preserved the ancient knowledge inherited from the Greeks and had enhanced it.

Rambam was an all-round scholar, expert not only in Jewish studies but also in the sciences of his age (by profession he was the court physician Saladin). One of his earliest surviving works is a monograph on astronomy. A casual reading of his works would easily reveal the following: he knew that the earth and other planets revolved around the sun (even though he dutifully quotes statements of the Talmudic sages to the contrary without comment); he states that the earth is a sphere approximately 24,000 miles in circumference (which is surprisingly correct); he gives the length of the solar year accurately to within 2 minutes; and so forth. He does not, as far as I know, relate to the question of polar day and night, but that may not have been out of ignorance, but rather since the question was supremely impractical.

(There is a legend that he negotiated with King Richard of England on behalf of Saladin in Ashkelon and that Richard was so impressed that he tried to lure him away from Cairo to London. How different would the development of Judaism in the west have been if Rambam had succumbed! By the way, Ibn-Ezra did visit London – and hated it.)

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