Then God said to Moses and to Aaron in the land of Egypt saying: This
month shall be unto you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of
the year to you. Exodus
12:1-2
While the commandment to sanctify the new moon is the fourth mitzva
in the Torah, it is the first given to Israel as a people.
Maimonides presents the mitzva in his listing of the 613 mitzvot
(the translation is from Rabbi Charles Chavel’s Maimonides: The
Commandments) thus:
By this commandment the Exalted One commanded us
concerning the reckoning of the months and years. That duty is never to be
performed by anyone except the Great Court, and must be performed in the
Land of Israel and nowhere else. You must know that the calculations which
we make today, and by which we know (the date of) new moons and festivals, are
not permitted to be made anywhere except only in the Land of Israel; but in a
time of emergency, and in the absence of sages from the Land of Israel, it was
permissible for a court that had received ordination in the Land of Israel to
intercalate months and to determine new moons outside the Land, as the Talmud
records that Rabbi Akiva did.
A great and fundamental principle of our faith,
which cannot be known or understood properly except by profound reflection, is
that when we today outside the Land reckon by the table of leap years that is
in our hands, and determine that one day is a new moon, and another a festival,
we do so not on the basis of our own reckoning, but because the Great Court in
the Land of Israel appointed that day to be the first of the month or a
festival day. Today we make calculations only in order to know what day the
inhabitants of the Land of Israel fixed. It is on their decision that we rely,
not on our calculations, which are nothing more than the ascertainment [of
something already determined]. You should thoroughly understand this.
I will explain this matter further to you. Suppose
we were to assume, for example, that the inhabitants of the Land of Israel
disappeared – which God forbid, since He has promised that He will not
altogether wipe out and uproot the remnant of the nation – and that there was
no court there, and that outside the Land there was no court which had received
ordination in the Land of Israel: in that case our calculations would be of no
use to us whatsoever, because we are not to make calculations outside the Land,
and to intercalate and fix new moons, except under the conditions mentioned, as
we have explained; [for it is written (Isaiah 2:3)]: “For out of Zion shall go
forth the law.” If anybody of sound mind examines what the Talmud says on this
subject, it will become clear to him that our interpretation is wholly correct
and admits of no doubt.
As Rabbi Yonah Dov Blumberg (1850-1931) noted in his treatise on the Mitzva
of Dwelling in the Land, Israel occupying its Land is an imperative, upon which
the very existence of the nation depends (since, without
proclamation/calculation of the months, observance of the mitzvot would
become impossible).
Thus, the first mitzva presented to Israel as a nation stresses
the connection between the nation and its Land.
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