Leap Year
Some years add a 13th month to our calendar. Because Hebrew months are aligned with moon cycles and are shorter than Gregorian months, if we only count twelve months every year, pretty quickly the whole calendar falls out of sync with the sun.
To compensate, sometimes we add an extra month of Adar. When you see a calendar with Adar I and Adar II, you might intuit that Adar II is the “extra” one. Surprise! Adar ONE is the extra, which sneaks in right before regular Adar! Adar is such a trickster!
Western culture fosters a fear of the number thirteen, so much so that many buildings won’t count a thirteenth floor. Patriarchal colonial minds have often associated thirteen with Indigenous practices and “witchcraft,” almost as if these “others” created this inconsistency in the calendar, rather than recognizing that the earth and sun are in perfect flow, unbothered by numerical discrepancies. It’s a human desire to predict, count, and plan, and many cultures have come up with ingenious ways to do this.
The Hebrew calendar is based on a 19-year cycle. This is the number of years that it takes for the moon cycles to return to the exact same place within the solar cycle. Within that big cycle, there are 12 non-leap years, called peshuta or “simple,” and 7 leap or me’uberet years. Me’uberet years are numbers 3, 6, 8, 11, 14, 17, and 19. We have to know which part of the cycle we are in to know when the next leap year will occur. Sometimes it’s every three years, sometimes it’s every other year. There are mnemonic devices to remember this pattern, one involving the notes in a major scale, one a Hebrew acronym, but none of them are easy to explain, so we’ll let you research that yourself if you’re interested.
If you want to figure out which year of the 19 year cycle we are in, take the number of the year and divide it by 19; the remainder tells you which year of the cycle it is. For those who remember how to do long division, you’ll find that 5784 divided by 19 is 304, with a remainder of 8. This means we are in year eight of the 304th 19-year cycle since the beginning of the Hebrew calendar. Whoa!