One of the sites we did not see on this trip to Israel was the zodiac mosaic in Tzippori. Nor did we visit the zodiac mosaic in the Hammat Tiberias shul. In fact, much to my son’s chagrin, we did not visit any of the five synagogues in Israel where zodiac mosaics have been discovered, though happily for him, we did see some of the Roman mosaics left at Caesaria.
Our lack of zodiac visits, in our case, had everything to do with traffic, children’s patience levels, and our other plans—and not a moral objection to the Zodiac or its place in synagogues, but that has not always been true historically. Born in the cradle of Zoroastrianism, our Talmudic sages had a complicated relationship with the Zodiac. On the one hand, our text declares ein mazal l’Yisrael—there is no planet for Israel—but on the other hand, the names for the majority of the Hebrew months are derived from the Babylonian calendar, which dates back to the Babylonian exile in the sixth century B.C.E.
Take, for example, the month in which we currently find ourselves. While the Torah certainly refers to the months of the year, it does so only by their place on the calendar—citing the first month, or the fourth, in this case. The months in the Torah are not named; rather, everything is tied to the Exodus from Egypt. We see a mention of Tammuz, the current month, only in the Book of Ezekiel (8:14), which says: “God brought me to the entrance of the north gate of the House of GOD; and there sat the women bewailing Tammuz.” Scholars have traced the name to the ancient Babylonian/Assyrian fertility god Dumuzi.
More than the intricacies of ancient Mesopotamian gods and goddesses—though my son would love to tell you more about them—I remain fascinated by the ways that our ancients, both Biblical and rabbinic, interacted with the world around them. While some of the texts (Deuteronomy in particular) might purport to reject the surrounding culture entirely, the realities on the ground (literally, in the case of the mosaics) suggest a different, more complex and muti-vocal, relationship. As in our 21st century world, our Hebrew calendar reflects a world in conversation with popular culture, open to the questions, issues, and conversations of the day.
—Rabbi Sari Laufer