Avodah Zarah 8

The rabbis have established that trade with gentiles is not permitted for three days preceding their festivals, for fear of contributing to idolatry happening on those festivals. The mishnah on today’s daf addresses a natural follow-up question: What are the non-Jewish festivals?

And these are the festivals of gentiles: Kalenda, Saturnalia, and Kratesis, and the day of the festival of their kings, and the birthday of the king, and the anniversary of the day of the death of the king. — This is the statement of Rabbi Meir. 

It immediately becomes clear in the Gemara that the rabbis were not well acquainted with the festivals named by Rabbi Meir in the mishnah — perhaps because the amoraim whose voices populate the Gemara lived in Babylonia centuries after the tannaim of the Mishnah who lived in the land of Israel. The Gemara, therefore, begins by clarifying when these festivals take place:

Rav Hanan bar Rava says: When are these festivals celebrated? Kalenda is celebrated during the eight days after the winter solstice, and Saturnalia is celebrated during the eight days before the winter solstice.

Curious, isn’t it, that the wider non-Jewish world celebrated eight day festivals at the winter solstice? Jews have one too, of course. If the rabbis were anthropologists or historians of religion, they might have explored whether there is a connection between the relatively late Jewish festival of Hanukkah, instituted by (and probably as propaganda for) the Hasmoneans, and these popular pagan winter festivals. But the rabbis were not anthropologists or historians; they were jurists and theologians. So the rabbis give an entirely different explanation for Kalenda and Saturnalia:

The sages taught: When Adam the first man saw that the day was progressively diminishing, he said: “Woe is me; perhaps because I sinned the world is becoming dark around me and will ultimately return to the primordial state of chaos and disorder. And this is the death that was sentenced upon me from Heaven, as it is written: And to dust shall you return. (Genesis 3:19)” He arose and spent eight days in fasting and in prayer.

Once he saw that the season of Tevet (i.e., the winter solstice) had arrived, and saw that the days were progressively lengthening, he said: “This is the order of the world.” He went and observed a festival for eight days. Upon the next year, he observed both these eight days and those eight days as festivals.

After God exiled Adam and Eve from Eden, the rabbis relate, they were forced to find their own sustenance. As the season progressed, it became increasingly difficult. The days grew shorter, colder, darker. Having never experienced the onset of winter, Adam concluded that the world was coming to an end. After all, God had warned Adam that not only was he fashioned from dust, he would return to dust. Perhaps this meant the whole world would go with him. So Adam fasted and prayed, hoping to avert the end of the world.

When the solstice passed and the days began to grow longer, Adam realized he had been mistaken — the world was not ending. Adam held a festival to celebrate survival. In ensuing years, the eight days before and after the solstice, those during which Adam fasted and feasted, continued to be marked as festivals.

With this tale, the rabbis have provided an explanation for the non-Jewish festivals of their world that fits directly into their own world view. Adam, after all, is an ancestor of all humanity. In rabbinic reckoning, he belongs to the non-Jews as much as to the Jews. But this would mean that those two eight-day festivals also belong to Jews as much as non-Jews! So why don’t Jews celebrate Kalenda and Saturnalia? Again, the rabbis have an explanation:

He, Adam, established these festivals for the sake of Heaven, but they (the gentiles of later generations) established them for the sake of idol worship.

In other words: What began as Adam’s earnest devotion to the one true God became, in the hands of later generations, idolatrous bacchanalia. In one bold move, the rabbis claim and then discard winter festivals that are not their own.

In the rabbinic understanding, some holidays are eternal. Shabbat, the Torah tells us, was established when Adam was merely hours old, eons before God even chose Abraham as the first Jew. It has always been core to Jewish identity, and always will be. But other holidays are less firmly established. Hanukkah, for instance, merits no talmudic tractate and, way back on Shabbat 21b, the Gemara naively asked: “What is Hanukkah?” On Rosh Hashanah 18b, we saw the sages debate whether Hanukkah should have been cancelled. According to Rav Yosef, the only reason we still celebrate Hanukkah is because: “Its miracle is well-known.” I understand this to mean that it was too popular to do away with. But many other Jewish holidays, dozens of them, recorded in an ancient document called Megillat Taanit, were ultimately cancelled. Most Jews have never heard of the majority of them.

So while Shabbat and a handful of other holidays are absolutely core to the Jewish tradition, other holidays wax and wane. Some last for generations, some don’t. Some are established by God, and some by humans. What matters, according to the rabbis, is not just the history or origin of the holiday, but the present understanding and purpose. Holidays don’t have to be dictated by God, and they don’t have to be invented by Jews. But they do need to align with Jewish values. Otherwise, as with the later incarnations of Kalenda and Saturnalia, Jews should steer clear.

Read all of Avodah Zarah 8 Sefaria.

This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on June 26, 2025. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.