San Francisco, CA – Steve Morse is a Jewish computer scientist who had a problem of sorts with the Hebrew calendar and a big question about Rosh Hashana, the New Year.
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It seemed to him the first Rosh Hashana had fallen on the wrong day of the week, if the rest of the calendar was to fall into place.
The ancient Jewish calendar, which is both a solar and lunar calendar, is dauntingly complex to the unschooled. Yet unlocking it is extremely important to many, including historians and genealogists researching vital records from “the old country.”
Birth, civil-marriage and death certificates and other vital records of Jewish ancestors from across Europe used Hebrew-calendar dates that meant nothing to most of their American descendants, said Morse, a famed computer-hardware developer as well as a renowned genealogist.
“Most American Jews wouldn’t even know what year this is on the Jewish calendar,” Morse said.
For the record, the New Year — which begins at sundown today — is 5771.
When Morse, now 70, was a teenager, in the years before personal computers, he tried to calculate his grandmother’s secular birthday from her known Jewish-calendar birth date. He didn’t succeed in nailing it down before her death, and so they celebrated it on the approximate date.
After wrestling years with Hebrew-calendar intricacies, Morse wrote a program to convert Jewish-calendar dates into the widely used Gregorian or Western calendar. He has also devised about 200 other online tools for novices to better climb the branches of their family trees.
But Morse was stuck for years trying to unravel why his computer program to convert Jewish-calendar dates into Gregorian dates kept spitting out some disparate results, including the wrong beginning of some years.
The Jewish New Year begins on the first day of the month of Tishri. And in the Book of Genesis — the first book of the Torah — it says God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, which Jews observe from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, their Sabbath.
Because of this, Morse said, he had naively assumed that creation and the Jewish calendar both began on a Sunday in Tishri 1 in Year 1. Yet the only way other dates converted correctly in his program was if creation, as described in Genesis, started on a Monday, not a Sunday. That would make Sunday the seventh day, or day of rest.
That didn’t compute from Morse’s Jewish perspective.
“The rabbis I asked didn’t know about mathematics,” Morse said. “My mathematician friends don’t know the Jewish calendar.”
Everything else with his program checked out. And about 20 years later, during which time his date-conversion program was being used by people all over the world, he finally learned the answer to the Rosh Hashana riddle, he said, thanks to a user of his program.
That person pointed him to Talmudic scholars who corrected his assumption about creation.
“Creation didn’t start on Tishri 1 in the Year 1, but instead, it started in the last week of Year 1, on a Sunday,” Morse said.
He removed the Rosh Hashana bug from his program.
I don’t get the point of this article. This guy is an idiot. There was never any bug. Every calander novice knows that year 1 is called ‘shnas tohu’. Year 1 started ellul 25 and was only 6 days long. This whole article doesn’t make sense, because if this guy made this fundamental mistake his whole calander would have fallen apart. It can’t be that everything else was fine like the article implied.
THANK YOU NOW I CAN REST EASY AND ENJOY THE YOM TOV THIS BOTHERED ME FOR THE LAST 20 YEARS
That’s the problem with lacking emuna. You need science to prove the torah. Nebach
As ShatzMatz said, creation of the world started on the 25th of Ellul. 1 Tishrei was on a Friday the day Adam was created not on Sunday!
“oh wow! my computer can prove the torah to be true!”
for #1 , you’re right
There is a book by Edgar Frank on the Jewish Calendar going through the whole “cheshbon” of Molad Tohu (known as molad B’H’RaD), which was a year before bri’as ho’olom and that we count from there. In the book Jewish Chrononomy by Leo Levi, he has conversion tables to convert back and forth from the Jewish calendar to the Civil calendar (including pre-Gregorian). Most Rabbonim don’t care about these things and so they don’t realize the differences (which is why he couldn’t get a straight answer from them).
The Jewish calendar is exceedingly easy once you understand it–look in Shvilei d’rokia at the beginning of Seder Mo’ed in the big (13 volume) mishnayos, wherein the Tiferes Yisroel explains the workings of the calendar.
Obviously, this fellow never looked in the mishnayos.
k’siva vachasimo tovo to all
Does this not resolve the Machlokes of B’Tishei Nivrah Haolam or B’Nissan Nivrah Haolam?
I don’t get it, back in the day before Hillel created the hebrew calendar, every month was renewed when two witnesses of the new moon came along, or on the day after the 30 of the previous month, so many years came out to be a day or two longer and others came out shorter. If Hillels calendar was used all along this guys problem would be valid, but since it all went on a month to month basis, the whole problem goes out of the window.
Rosh Hashana is the 6th day of creation, erev Shabos. It is the day that Adom Harishon was created. According to our calendar R”H can’t come out on Sunday, Wednesday or Friday. He has his question again.
He also doesn’t answer the Chazal that teaches about the Torah given 200 or so generations before brias haolam.
for #8 , no.
They used the mathematical calculations all along (which was the basis of the machlokes between Raban Gamliel and Rabi Yehoshua in the mishna 211;they used both, but once they used the witnesses came to beis din and gave eidus and beis din was m 217;kadesh hachodesh, that was it.
the Rambam says they had the calculation and in the Rokeach al Hatorah, Parshas Bo, on the posuk  220;Hachodesh 221; goes into the calculations. In effect they always had the mathematics and the eidus working together.