The Chinese have the year of the cat, rat, etc. Now Jews have the Year of the Sun. This new observance is based on an ancient tradition. Every 28 years, according to rabbinic tradition, the sun returns to the precise place in the heavens which it occupied at the moment of creation.
This year, the event, called BIrkat HaHama in Hebrew, will occur on the morning of April 8th, which also happens to be my father’s 85th birthday. And in honor of that event, a coalition of Jewish organizations is working to promote our awareness of the sun as a clean, green, sustainable source of energy.

While some will see this as nothing more than the bastardization of an ancient practice by people who do not even believe that the underlying cosmological premise is even close to correct, others will see this as the creative use of an ancient tradition to address a real human need in our era. There is wisdom in both of these reactions.
Let’s leave aside the organizers being open to charges of gross hypocrisy by invoking a practice based on rabbinic science whose truth even they reject. After all, the 3000 year story of the Jewish people has been sustained by such re-readings of the meaning implicit in many practices that may have changed little since their inception.
It is fair to ask however, whether or not this new practice actually betrays the Rabbis’ sense of what the blessing of the sun was all about.

Not because such betrayal would be wrong though. In fact, what we call “betrayal” is often just a creative re-reading that has not yet gained wide-spread acceptance. Of course, it might also ultimately be judged to be a betrayal, but that decision is best left to God and or history, not the generation which either makes or resists a particular change.

The concern here is whether or not the sponsors of this well-intentioned and highly creative use of a long ignored (by most) tradition, are even aware of the potential losses incurred by their interpretive move. They tell us that the Year of the Sun and the new practices they have created to honor it, celebrate “will serve as an on-going reminder of our dependence on this constant, reliable, indispensable part of our lives”.
Well, I supposes they are right about the sun’s indispensability, but its constancy and reliability? Those are precisely the things which the rabbis were teaching against!
Unlike the rest of the ancient world, which celebrated the sun for the very same reasons which the Year of the Sun folks celebrate it, the rabbis were more interested in the moon. Like the story of the Jewish people, is was not constant and often felt unreliable. Yet each month it renewed itself and went on, much like the Jewish people.
So like their interpretation of ridding our homes of leavened food on Passover, which they present as the historic understanding of the ritual (it’s not, certainly not the only one), they invite us to participate in practices which depart from the past without admitting the departure. I long for that degree of self-consciousness in their project and in all religious projects. It’s what gives permission to the next generation of re-interpreters to make of the tradition what they will without arguments about which is the “real” understanding of the tradition.
I would love for the creators of the Year of the Sun to admit the radical nature of their departure from the past as proudly as they claim to follow in its path. In fact, they are doing both. And admitting that they are doing both, and actually doing both, are keys to creating both a meaningful Jewish present and a successful Jewish future.