Rosh Hodesh (Archives)

“Bring an Atonement for Me that I diminished the moon!”

As this Sabbath is also Rosh Hodesh, it seems an opportune occasion to bring a particularly strange midrash related to the New Moon—prompted by a question I was recently asked about this by my friend and loyal reader Mark Feffer. The version below is from Tractate Hullin of the Babylonian Talmud; a shorter version, with only the final section containing the halakhic “punchline,” appears at Shavuot 9a; later on we will discuss parallels in Genesis Rabbah 6.3-4. Thus, in Hullin 60b:

Rabbi Shimon ben Pazi said: Two verses contradict one another: “And God created the two great luminaries” [Gen 1:16], and it is written, “the great light... and the small light” [ibid.]. The moon said before the Holy One blessed be He: Master of the Universe, can two kings wear one crown? He said to her: Go and diminish yourself. She said before Him: Master of the Universe, because I said a proper thing before You, must I diminish myself?! He said to her: Go and rule over the day and the night. She said to Him: Of what benefit is a candle in bright daylight? Of what benefit can I be? He said: Let Israel count days and years by you. She said to Him: the day is also impossible, nor are tekufot counted according to me. As is written: “and they [i.e., both the sun and the moon] shall be for seasons and appointed times, for days and years” [ibid. 1:15]. [He said:] Go and let the righteous be called by your name—Jacob the Small [ Amos 7:5], Samuel the Small [1 Sam 2:19], David the Small [1 Sam 16:11].

The first part of this midrash is based upon an inner contradiction in the account of the fourth day of Creation: the text first speaks of “two great luminaries” and immediately thereafter of “the great luminary” and “the small luminary.” The latter pair of phrase, expressing the obvious fact of the vast difference in intensity of light between the sun and the moon, known to mankind since hoary antiquity, prompted the conclusion that in some primordial era the sun and the moon must have been equal. (Following the approach of Gerald Schroeder’s Science of God and others who try to align Genesis 1 with modern cosmogony, this might correspond to the period when the great masses of super-hot gasses formed by the Big Bang were cooling down into cohesive bodies.) The moon found this situation disquieting; it seemed to her an elemental rule of nature?/society? that there must always be one “king”: that a situation in which authority is shared by two rulers is untenable (even though here, presumably, they both knew that God was the supreme ruler over them both). The corollary would seem to be that competition, not only for material resources or for sexual partners, but for power per se, is an inevitable part of the state of nature.

Did the moon, having brought this to God’s attention, expect to be named the supreme figure in the celestial realm and for the sun to be demoted? In any event, God made her smaller, creating the situation we know today. The moon, justly piqued, complained of this, and God suggested various alternatives: that she rule (i.e., be visible) during both day and night; that the calendar be determined by her. The moon points out that neither of these solutions will work. The last answer given is perhaps the most interesting: making a virtue of smallness, noting that such biblical heroes as Samuel, David, and Jacob (i.e., the Jewish people as a whole) are in various places described as “small.” (Perhaps this is one of the ideas in the parallel in Gen Rab 6.3, where the destiny of Israel among the nations is seen as parallel to that of the moon.)

He saw that the moon was not satisfied [by all this]. So the Holy One blessed be He said to her: Bring an atonement for Me that I have diminished the moon. This is what R. Shimon ben Lakish said: What is different about the goat of Rosh Hodesh, that it is said of it, “[a sin offering] for the Lord” [Num 28:15]. The Holy One blessed be He said: Let this goat be an atonement for Me that I have diminished the moon.

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Having seen that none of his suggestions mollified the moon, God instructs Israel to bring a sacrifice every Rosh Hodesh—the moon’s special day—to atone on His behalf! This is a truly bizarre-sounding idea. How can the infinite, perfect, omnipotent and omniscient God require atonement? What is going on here? To begin with, there was an exegetical problem regarding the verse in Numbers 28:15 describing the additional offering brought on Rosh Hodesh: unlike all the other Musaf offerings described throughout Numbers 28-29, which are referred to simply as “a sin offering,” here the odd phrase, hattat la-Shem, “a sin-offering for the Lord,” is used, suggesting that this offering is somehow intended to atone for wrong-doing on the part of God Himself. What sin can God have possible committed? Perhaps the idea is that there was something unjust in the very fact that He created the Universe in such a way that there must be strong and weak, rich and poor (note that, in many cultures, sun and moon symbolize gold and silver), ruler and ruled. More important: by creating all living things—animals, human beings and, by imaginative midrashic extension, even the insensate heavenly bodies—with the instinct for competition rather than cooperation, He has bears ultimate responsibility for the injustices and frustrations that must inevitably follow. Perhaps these harsh facts of life (and could the universe have been created in any other way? One reading of the Garden of Eden story is that an eternal Godlen Age was unworkable) are in fact God’s “Original Sin.”

I can only touch very briefly upon another line of interpretation, appearing both in Maharsh”a (R. Shmuel Idels of Ostraha, the most important commentator on the aggadah in the Talmud), and in the previously-mentioned midrash in Genesis Rabbah 6.3: viz. that the moon here symbolizes the Jewish people, whose historical destiny was to assume a “diminished,” politically subjugated role through much of their history. God’s counsel to the moon is also His advice to the Jews: to accept their difficult, “smaller” situation, of having only “reflected“ light in this world (which is compared to night), with a kind of philosophical resignation; and to comfort themselves, (a) with occasional periods of ascent, and (b) with the promise of messianic redemption. (I mist admit that this interpretation has perhaps more of a ring of Jewish authenticity, of peshuto shel midrash, than my existential, universal reading proposed above; but I too am a product of my own, more open historical milieu, and perhaps my reading is at least another of the seventy faces of Torah.)

An interesting footnote: Torah Temimah (on Num 28:15) quotes Maimonides in Guide III.46, where he gives rationalistic, non-mythic explanation of the phrase “a sin-offering for the Lord” that prompted this midrash: that the ancient pagans offered a sacrifice to the moon every New Moon, and in order to alleviate possible suspicion that Israel’s Rosh Hodesh also entails sacrifices to a heavenly body, the Torah specifies that it is “for the Lord”—i.e., reaffirming monotheistic theology.