The rules for the duration of Shabbat are pretty clear: Roughly 25 hours and a few minutes after candlelighting on Friday night. Unless you are in a place like Reykjavik, Iceland. There, Shabbat can sometimes last a lot longer.
“In the winter, sunset is at about 3:30 in the afternoon,” says Rabbi Avraham Feldman of the Jewish Community Center of Iceland. “But then in the summer solstice, you could have sunset after midnight.
“When the sun goes to the lowest point below the horizon, it starts to go back up again. That happens to us every day. When you’re in certain locations, the sun also goes into the sky and when it goes down, it just never sets.
“If you use that tracking to count seven days, seven rotations of the sun in the sky, when it gets to the seventh time going down, that’s when your Shabbat begins.”
Rabbi Feldman has to be part astronomer and part mathematician to guide his congregation, which, during some parts of the year, meets for Friday night services after candlelighting at 9:30 p.m.
They dutifully return for Havdalah on Sunday at 1:30 a.m.
“For two months a year we have the ‘white nights,’” Rabbi Feldman tells the IJN.
“There is no nightfall for two months because the sun doesn’t set far enough below the horizon for it to be considered night.
“It creates some interesting Shabbat scheduling.”
Such is life at one of the northernmost outposts in the world with a Jewish population, 1,787 miles from the North Pole. Time can pass differently when sunset takes weeks, or longer.
“In a place where it’s so dark you sometimes can’t properly fulfill the mitzvah of Shabbat,” says Rabbi Dovid Heber of Khal Ahavas Yisroel Tzemach in Baltimore, Md.
“The same goes for the mitzvah of tefilin. There’s one opinion that there’s no way to fulfill that mitzvah because of the absence of daylight, especially in some locations in December.
“It may be certainly better not to go to certain locations and get yourself into this situation.”
Heber is considered one of the world’s experts on scientific anomalies of sunrise and sunsets, and how that relates to Judaism. His 2007 article “When Does One Pray When There is No Day,” is a primer on the phenomenon.
Heber cites Longyearbyen, Norway, as the northernmost town in the world, when the sun stays above the horizon all the way from April 20 to August 25.
That’s one long Sabbath!
Such is not daunting to the likes of Iceland’s only rabbi, Rabbi Feldman, a Brooklyn native whose wife is from Sweden.
Six years ago she suggested to her husband that they investigate a rabbinical opening in Iceland. They haven’t looked back.
“We actually enjoy it here,” says Feldman, who apparently has become a master student of calendar astrophysics to properly guide his synagogue to the full extent of Jewish law.
“There are some moments where you’re waiting for Shabbat to be over, whether you want to go somewhere, or check your phone. But, because it doesn’t end, we just go to sleep at a regular time and wake up in the morning early to do Havdalah.
“As a result, it’s very relaxed here. We just have a wonderful day together with our family and community.”
Even if it takes a bit longer than the rest of the world.
For the record, candlelighting in Denver on April 5 is 7:11 p.m. Havdalah is on Saturday at 8:14 p.m., 25 hours after the start of Shabbat, just the way it is in most locales.
In places where that isn’t the case, Rabbi Heber cites two theories that are “exemptions” for observant Jews trying to follow the laws dictated by sunrise and sunset.
“There is an opinion that says you take an average day, basically 6 a.m. 6 p.m., roughly 12 hours,” says Heber. “You call that day, and then you take the 12 hours of night and you call that night. In the absence of any real night you take what’s on the clock.”
Heber’s other theory appears to give Jews a further break.
“It’s in the commentary in the Mishnah,” Heber says, “that you go by where you came from.
“In other words, you’re coming from Denver to another region, you do your mitzvahs at the same time as your family or friends are doing it in Denver. That’s where you come from.
“What’s so interesting is, according to that opinion, technically we could both end up at the same location, and we will be doing the mitzvahs at a different time.”
By the way, should you happen to know an observant traveler heading to the North Pole who wishes to opt out of the “exemptions” and play by strict rules, wish that person good luck.
The North Pole has no time zone.