Overcoming the tyranny of distance

In his seminal work The Tyranny of Distance, historian Professor Geoffrey Blainey’s thesis is that distance has proven to be the great force in Australian history. The persistent challenge has been to conquer it.
If such has been the underlying theme of Australian history, how much more so has the need to conquer the tyranny of distance been a theme underlying the history of Jewish life throughout the millennia of the Diaspora.

Parashat haChodesh, read this week as a forerunner to the month of Nissan that incorporates Pesach, contains the first command given to Israel as a nation – the requirement to have our own calendar. As its implementation developed, the calendar, and hence the annual cycle of Jewish life, was predicated on the monthly decisions of Jewry’s highest religious authority – the Beth Din based in Yerushalayim – that made a monthly determination as to the date of the new moon.

This determination was communicated to far-flung communities, including those of Bavel, by means of mountaintop fire signals or messengers on horseback. As was to become clear during the days of both Rabban Gamliel (when his colleague Rabbi Joshua believed that Yom Kippur fell on a different date from that proclaimed by Rabban Gamliel) and Saadiah Gaon (who established the pre-eminence of Babylonian Gaonic calculations over those of the Gaonim of Jerusalem), unity in regard to the calendar was a prerequisite for continuity of world Jewry as one nation.

Difference in observance of national dates was a recipe for national disintegration. And already then the rabbis feared that the impact of the tyranny of distance could lead to disintegration of Jewry as a unit.
National unity aside, a primary purpose of communication of the date of the new moon (prior to the advent of the fixed calendar) was to advise the dates of the festivals occurring in any given month.

However, it was not possible to reach every community in a far-flung Diaspora. Hence the introduction of the second day of many festivals to ensure that we would celebrate on the correct day even if one day was wrong.