For Jews, Another 28 Years, Another Blessing of the Sun

NEW YORK, NY — Every day, the sun rises. But only once every 28 years does the sun return to the position it occupied at the same time during the week of its creation, according to Talmudic tradition.

This auspicious occasion is cause for celebration among many observant Jews, who will greet Wednesday morning with the Birkat Hachamah, or Blessing of the Sun. In the Hebrew calendar, it is the 14th day of Nisan in the year 5769.

Assorted events open to the public — many organized and promoted by the Chabad-Lubavitch movement — will take place in New York City, with a large gathering expected at 7 a.m. at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza on East 47th Street, shine or rain.

“You can’t do sunrise unless you go east to the water,” said Rabbi Joshua Metzger, director of Chabad-Lubavitch of Midtown, who will lead the blessing.

“I remember as a 15-year-old in 1981 staying up all night the night before because we were so scared we’d sleep in and miss it,” he said.

In 1981, thousands of Jews gathered excitedly near 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Lubavitch’s world headquarters, for a service led by their revered leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Many danced joyously in “an outpouring of prayer and devotion,” Rabbi Metzger said.

Back then, other celebrations to greet the dawn took place atop the Empire State Building as well as the World Trade Center.

“It is a milestone,” Rabbi Metzger, now 43, said of the occasion, which occurs maybe three times in a lifetime. “It reflects the intergenerational passage of life.” His father, Rabbi Alter Metzger, now 76, first participated in 1953, and his children will join in for the first time on Wednesday.

The service will be brief, Rabbi Joshua Metzger said — no more than half an hour. Wednesday also happens to be a busy day for Jews because Passover begins in the evening.

People are instructed to look only once at the sun, to emphasize that they are praying not to the sun but to its creator. Wearing sunglasses is a matter of individual preference.

Wednesday’s forecast is for a partly cloudy morning; in case of heavy cloud cover or rain, the blessing will be altered slightly.

The calculation goes like this: God created the sun, the moon and the stars on Wednesday, the fourth day. A solar year is about 365 1/4 days, or about 52 weeks and 1 1/4 days. So each year since creation, the sun rises 1 1/4 days, or 30 hours, later. It takes 28 years for the sun to again hit the same position in the firmament at the same moment on the same day of the week.

Of course, it is not that simple. The astronomical computations, as well as the proper course of action in case the sun is obscured, are “subjects of great discussion, debate and analysis,” Rabbi Metzger said.

Though the sun was created during the vernal equinox, a solar year is not precisely 365 1/4 days, but a few minutes less. Over many millennia, the time difference puts the solar calendar out of sync with the lunar Hebrew calendar; the actual vernal equinox occurred on March 20.

Today, with widespread Internet communication, the formerly arcane blessing is garnering much attention, Rabbi Metzger said.

Chabad’s efforts to publicize the ceremony have also helped. The group has released television news footage from the 1981 blessing, and has a link to an 1897 New York Times clip recounting how one rabbi fled and another was arrested after failing to obtain a permit for an assemblage of hundreds of “orthodox Hebrews” in Tompkins Square. The rabbis’ explanations in limited English to the Irish-American police officer didn’t help, the article said, and tensions mounted.

At Chabad’s Web site about the event, chabad.org/sun, the organization plans a series of live Webcasts from seven locations as the sun crosses the globe. The 8 a.m. celebration in Christchurch, New Zealand (that’s 4 p.m. Tuesday for New Yorkers), will be followed by ceremonies in Brisbane, Australia; Jerusalem; London; Long Island City, Queens (where the blessing will take place at 8:30 a.m. in Gantry Plaza State Park); Colorado Springs; and Honolulu.

The event in 1981 was “quite an august gathering” and a “time of tremendous emotion,” said Rivkah Slonim, an educator at Chabad in Binghamton, N.Y., who attended the Crown Heights ceremony at 17.

“It becomes an occasion of reflection when I think of where I was then and where I am now, and how the world has changed so radically and how the world will change in 28 years,” she said.

Mrs. Slonim added that “things that were science fiction are part of our daily lives,” but “what matters most is still going to matter most.” Like the rising of the sun, she said, “some things are eternal and unchanging.”