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A Strange Savings Bank
The summer time wars


It's 22nd April.

On most March mornings I was rising at my usual hour between 5:30 and 5:50 a.m., glorious sunshine streaming through my window. After a cold, dark, rainy winter, I could again find the bathroom without tripping over something inadvertently left on the floor.

This morning, and for the last twenty-odd mornings before it, I have returned to waking in the dark, very dark winter darkness. In reality I am rising an hour earlier than I was in March. Rather than say, "Everybody, from today please wake an hour earlier to start your day", the government ordered everyone to set their clocks forward one hour to achieve the same exact result. Daylight savings time began in Israel on early Friday morning, 29th March.


Recently haredi Knesset member, Moshe Gafni, protested against a bill that changes the date a child commences school to be according to the Christian calendar and not the Jewish one as has been in the past. He called the step to the sole use of the "secular calendar a serious step". He warned, "We are going to raise a generation that does not know anything about Judaism."

While I agree with Gafni on this point, I wonder where he has been on other calendar issues, including daylight saving time and the dates of summer school break (as opposed to the winter vacations which are [still] hanuka and pesah).


I don't think anyone in Israel, who held a Pesach seder this year, did not appreciate starting a good hour earlier than in previous years. This year, we celebrated earlier enough for the [grand]children to still be wide awake and interested in participating. Why can't we do this every year? Because the wise men who decide what should be our lifestyles, determined that our change to daylight savings be tied to the secular calendar, nearly two weeks after North America's changeover and ten days before Europe's.

Why was this Pesach different? It is a result of a quirk in the Jewish calendar, something the summer time proponents did not anticipate when they fixed a secular-based changeover date. As Israel's changeover is earlier than Europe's, I can only assume the Israeli proponents chose their date, the last Friday in March, to ensure Pesach would always be in Israel's summer time. Had they chosen the European date, Pesach would often occur before the changeover. As they obviously do not understand the intricate workings of our traditional calendar, which they find irrelevant, they fumbled it.





Daylight savings has again become a hot issue here in Israel. The "problem" seems to pop up every now and again on my news screen. Our parliament relegislates dates (as it did last year) and then responds by setting up another investigative committee (as it did last week). This year we will change our clocks "back" well after Yom Kippur and Sukkot; next year, assuming no new legislation in the next eighteen months, we will change to winter time the night immediately after Yom Kippur! on 5th October, 2014.

Daylight savings, or summer time as it is called in some places, was first introduced in 1916 in response to fuel shortages during World War I, initially in Germany and Austria, and soon afterwards in England. During World War II, England even had "double daylight savings", namely clocks were moved two hours forward.

In those days the energy saved by moving waking hours to the evening was significant. A very large proportion of electricity usage was to provide domestic and public lighting. In those distant days no-one used artificial lighting while it was still light outside. Even when I went to school in the sixties, we only used the room lights if the sky was black during a storm. We had big windows in our classrooms which provided ample lumination.

Today we use more electricity during the day than at night. First, shops and offices have their lights switched on all day, everyday. Buildings are rarely designed nowadays to take advantage of natural ambient light. Many "modern" offices and shops don't have windows in many of their rooms. Even windowed shops on the high street design their street-side displays in such a way that very little light penetrates inwards. In most shopping malls, even shops on an external wall, lack an opening to the outside.

Not only does outside light never enter these premises, the lack of windows necessitates artificial ventilation, or more precisely, heating and cooling, air-conditioning and climate control. Increasing energy usage. Malls are generally open from eight in the morning until ten or eleven at night. The hour at which the sun comes up and goes down is irrelevant in such a setting. The designers of modern shopping complexes prefer that you are unaware, even cut off, from the outside world. Their aim is to create an artificial environment, a bubble, a unique experience, with appropriate musak wafting in the background, setting your pace to match their mazed aisles. They hope you will spend more time and thus more money in their establishments.


So why is this clock-change forced upon us, and on a majority of temperate zones countries? I do not know the true reason; I haven't heard much more than, "but I like the longer days". Economists used to tell us that we were saving massive amounts of energy and money, but even they have largely dropped this claim. As I have indicated above, our world functions differently today than it did in the not too distant past. Now the savings proponents allege the clock change reduces traffic accidents and makes people happier. They attempt to present statistics to support their premise. As much as I hate to quote clichés, even those popularised by the great Mark Twain, there are "Lies, damned lies, and statistics". These statistics rarely stand up to serious scrutiny.

According to Bill Bryson in Made in America, the non-war push for daylight savings, came from a "businessman named William Willet, who wanted it primarily so that he could have more daylight to play golf in the evenings . . . the responses were vociferous. The New York Times called it an 'act of madness' and others seriously suggested that they might equally change thermometers to make summers appear cooler and winters warmer. As one historian has put it, 'the idea of altering the clocks to suit human whim made daylight savings seem both unnatural and almost monstrous to its opponents'. . . it wasn't until 1966 that America got universal summer time." [chapter 5, page 80]






I contend that the majority in Israel really do not want daylight savings time but are dazzled by the statistics and internet generated petitions, the latest supposedly signed by 400,000 people. This is only 5% of the population. Such a small number should not faze too many a politician; recall in Israel there are no constituencies about which to be concerned.

In case some of my readers do not know me or my stance -- I'm pretty out there with my thinking -- I am a religious Jew living in the Yerushalayim area.This reality colours my worldview, a view of which I am proud to maintain. I also spend a lot of time outdoors; I swim, bicycle ride and go to the gym daily. I also love to hike around my country.

But I hasten to add that this point of view is not mine alone; I know it is shared by at a minimum of hundreds of thousands of my fellows and neighbours, within acceptable statistical tolerances.


Following a number of years of living with daylight savings, people seem to have forgotten that a clock change is not necessary to lengthen summer's daylight hours. This is a natural phenomenon occurring over the course of each and every year. It seems ludicrous to have to state this explicitly: there are far more daylight hours in the summer than in the winter. To be precise, in Israel at thirty-three degrees north of the equator, there are two hours and twelve minutes more afternoon as compared with the winter (and of course there is the same additional time every morning). In midsummer, without a time adjustment, it would still be light outside at 7 p.m. (As a comparison, in Stockholm, Sweden, the amount of additional afternoon in the middle of the summer is 6 hours and 32 minutes greater than in midwinter at each end of the day.)

I enjoy summer evenings, especially at higher elevations, or on the coast, where on most days a cooling westerly wind wafts in from the Mediterranean, providing relief from the hot Israeli summer. Why is having the sun shine on these summer evenings preferable to the pleasant twilight? A variety of ambiances makes life more interesting and congenial. Sitting down outside in the evening breeze with friends and family, accompanied by a meal, a beer or a glass of wine, is a very pleasing experience that now must wait until after nine o'clock.


If my memory still serves me well, the initial excuse to terminate summer time "early" (the beginning of September) was back in Yosef Burg's days as Interior Minister. It was "blamed" on the necessity to allow S'faradi Jews, who start saying s'lichot, penitential prayers, three weeks before their Ashkenazi brothers, to pray in daylight. I never understood this line of argument. If anything the opposite is true, because (at least with the Ashkenazim with whose customs I am more familiar) s'lichot are supposed to be recited prior to sunrise, at a time which causes you to wake earlier than your usual habit! Perhaps this was something that someone thought the non-religious would just accept on face value as a religious reality. Really?!

The truth is, the problem is not the saying of s'lichot in the daylight hours, but of reciting the regular daily prayers, which must not be said, on any day of the year, prior to sunrise (other than in certain extenuating circumstances i.e. do not use this leniency every day). Sadly our modern society is governed by our clocks and not by astronomical or biological phenomena. But the halakha is clear; the morning prayer should be recited after sunrise. It is problematic enough in midwinter where many need to start their day clock-time early. However by artificially moving the clock forward by an hour around the times of the equinox, unnecessarily returns midwinter's difficulties into the start and end of summer.


Lately "economists" are pushing that we should extend summer time until the end of October so as to be "in line with Europe". This would exacerbate the prayer time problem even further; sunrise would be clock-time later in October than it is December!

I emphatically tell these economists that Israel is a proud, independent nation. We have our own agenda, climate and custom. We do not need to emulate the Europeans or anyone else. History has taught us that following European customs is fraught with danger. But even following these false prophets' thinking to align ourselves with Europe, by not introducing daylight savings time, we would be putting ourselves right in line with them. Without an Israeli clock change, the bulk of Europe -- don't forget there are three time zones there -- in the summer would have "changed" to our standard time. That is, the time here and in most of Europe would be identical for seven months of the year! Easier for everyone businessmen and travellers alike, here and in Europe. An added advantage would be that for nearly eight months each year, we would be only six hours ahead of Americas' eastern states. Our business days would thus overlap by two hours, a great plus for business people or for users of office hour services on both sides of the Atlantic.


Economists love to play with numbers and costs to the overall economy. There are perhaps two macroeconomic factors they should, but don't, take into account. Humans are governed by a circadian, or biological, clock. (In 1994 a gene that controls this clock was discovered in mice.) This internal clock causes people to wake up at the same time everyday, usually before their bedside alarm goes off. A sudden change of even one hour throws off your internal timer. If you normally wake at 5:30 each morning, it will take you some time to adjust to waking at 4:30. That's why in most of the world the clocks are changed on early Sunday mornings. As most don't work on Sundays, they can "sleep in" that missing hour. But that just pushes the problem off for another day. Sleeping in once does not adjust your body's timing.

Similarly, at the other end of the summer, you need to tell your body it's OK to sleep for another hour. But you still wake up as usual. The time it take for these changes to become regularised depends on each individual. Your genetic make-up largely governs this; it is not identical in each person or mammal. I have found, as I age, it takes my system far longer to acclimatise. Similarly when I travel across time zones, my adjustment requires longer than it did forty years ago. People may be at work, but their efficiency is reduced at the changeover times. Please all you economics professors, calculate the loss to the economy of dazed zombies in the office.


Twice a year when clocks must be changed, I walk around the house twirling watch and clock hands. I adjust the time on our two cars. In the workplace, places of recreation, and in public and private buildings, all wall clocks need to be modified. Today, Microsoft, Linux and the mobile phone companies have at least removed the necessity to reset my computers and phones.

What is the economic cost of this action? I'll use Fermi's method of rough estimation. The professors will certainly provide a more accurate figure. Let's assume Israel has a million households, each owning one vehicle. Assume each house has four clocks (ovens, microwaves, walls) and four watches. Assume it takes half a minute to reach each timepiece and to make the adjustment. Let's assume an average man-hour in Israel costs 35 shekels. Here is the formula for the cost of change our home clocks:

Cost = (2 x (1,000,000 x 9 x .5)/60) x 35 = 5,250,000 N.I.S.

Five million shekels is not an insignificant sum -- and I believe my guestimates are very conservative; the real figure is higher. And I have only taken account of personal clocks.


I do not believe there is a parent, religious or totally secular, who does not have an easier time putting their kids to bed when it is dark outside. I know this is my experience, and I suggest our economists ask their own children for their honest views.


A friend suggested that the summer time debate was related to what she called "the Tel Aviv--Jerusalem divide". I hadn't previously thought about this. Sadly there are certainly different worldviews between sub-groups within our society. Was she implying religious versus secular, fun-loving versus traditional, younger versus older, richer versus poorer?

We mountain dwellers visited Tel Aviv last year for a few days change of scenery. Jill and I consider this a vacation, a shift in pace. One night we went out for dinner and then went for a long walk -- longer than we anticipated as, not knowing the back streets of Tel Aviv, we lost our bearings. It was OK. We eventually found our hotel, well before morning. We were on holidays, we were not time constricted. And we encountered sections of the city we had never visited, never knew existed. The following day I was relating our nocturnal walkabout to my cousin, a Tel Aviv dweller of many years.

"Did you pass the bars in Allenby", he asked.

"Yes", I said, "but it was quite quiet. Surprisingly. I thought these were the centre of nocturnal activity in this city, the place to be and be seen. The heart of the city that never sleeps."

"At what time were there?"

"Sometime between ten and ten-thirty."

"Oh that was far too early. It doesn't get interesting until well after that time", was his response.

Indeed some "young" Telavivians come home from work say eightish, grab a bite to eat and then have a sleep for a few of hours, waking ready for their night prowl. They may party until after 3 a.m., returning home for the remainder of their night sleep. Rising after 8:00 a.m, they breakfast, get dressed and are off to work by about nine. Don't get me wrong. I am not being judgemental. I am not criticising their lifestyle, but it is very different to ours. Sunrise and sunset really don't concern them, except perhaps returning home from work while it is still a little light. But they matter to me because I want to pray early; I want to pray my morning prayer with the rising sun with out feeling the pressure of that overpowering artificial clock.

Summer evenings too present problems. The earliest possible midsummer evening services end around 8:30 p.m. That's quite late to come home for dinner. Given my rising time, this doesn't leave much of an evening for extracurricular and social activities. Unless of course I am forced to abandon my evening learning and prayers, or to move them to other times of the day and night.


Some people laugh when I make the following point, but I am being serious. It is related to ladies' ritual immersion in a mikve*. The earliest time a woman may go is twenty minutes after sunset, which in midsummer is at 8:15 p.m. A visit ranges from thirty to sixty minutes. Not much evening remains after that. And this calculation assumes no waiting time. As with all services, waiting time varies with demand. Of course one does not have to arrive at opening time. I have found however that many mikve attendants like to close the doors around tenish whether they have been open for two hours or four. I doubt too many will throw clients out, but in essence, hours of service have been effectively reduced.


In midsummer, shabat ends after 8:30 p.m. Which means an observant Jew returns home close to 9:00. This doesn't leave much time for going out, or even doing much in the house. Remember, I and myriads of my counterparts, will still awaken on Sunday morning at 5:30 a.m. Many people start shabat early on a Friday afternoon, but the majority do not. Again this means getting home from the synagogue at 9:00 p.m. for kidush and dinner. Not very conducive to the heavy shabat meal that most seem to consume irrespective of the clock time. And in most synagogues, the services commence the following morning at the same they do midwinter! Which translates to an hour less sleep. I suppose I have plenty of time to sleep it off during the extra daytime I now have.

Some houses of worship adjust their sabbath prayer times in the summer. I find this ludicrous -- adjusting for the adjustment. I would humbly suggest that we just make a single adjustment. Don't change the clocks at the equinox, but instead, where desired or necessary, change the times of our activities, in other words, only for those to whom it is important, will change they schedules. This is what we used to do before the introduction of clock changes, both here and abroad. Everyone will know that, say, between shavu'ot and rosh hodesh Elul, opening hours are half an hour, one hour, two hours, twenty-seven minutes earlier than the remainder of year.

Our schools start earlier than their those in most of the West; perhaps we may want to adjust classe starting time by half an hour later in the winter. Today's children travel further to reach school than did their predecessors forty years ago. Cities were smaller and activities were localised. In midwinter, children start school less than ninety minutes after sunrise; many must leave home before it is light outside.


Another suggestion I would like to present is a reconsideration of work hours in Israel, allowing the introduction of optional flexitime. This has worked well in other parts of the world. It obviously doesn't apply to every job in our economy, but with a little imagination and will, it could apply to many. Most employers want you to be at your place of work for say eight hours a day. They often don't care whether you start work at 7 a.m. or at 10. They simply want you to get your work in an efficient manner. Spreading the workday over more elapsed hours has the advantage of spreading peak traffic on the roads and on public transport to more hours of the day. Less people on the roads means less driver frustration and road rage, leading to fewer accidents. Retail trading is largely two shifts, matching people's buying habits to their working hours.

Flexitime means that some workers may choose a quieter start or end to their workday, essentially adjust their own clock. Extending this further, more and more people and their employees are adopting a virtual office approach, allowing to people to work from home some of the time. These options allow further flexibility in the choice of work and leisure hours, and in hours spent travelling.

It could also help our relationship with our children. Father can start work later, allowing him to spend morning time with the kids and take them school. At the other end of the day, mother could pick them at the end of her workday.


Another argument presented by "modern" daylight savings proponents is that implementation of their concept reduces motor vehicle accidents. This is very difficult to prove. We have no true data with which to make a valid comparison: the winter, when roads are wet and it almost dark at 4:30 p.m.?; the time before we had summer time -- traffic accidents in general have come down and we probably have twice as many cars on the roads, and we have better roads and we many overpasses and tunnels . . . ? northern Europe where it is dark at 3 p.m. in the winter?


Israel declared its independence on Friday, 15th May, 1948, corresponding to 5th Iyar in the Jewish calendar. When things settled down, the new Israeli parliament, the Knesset, legislated this Hebrew date as Independence Day. They also established the previous day as Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers, recently modified to include victims of terror. The law specifies that public mourning would take the form of the entire nation standing still at the sound of a siren at 8:00 p.m. in the evening and 11 a.m. the next morning.

Due the structure of our calendar, the 5th Iyar can occur on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday or Shabat. The religious establishment accepted these two dates as days of religious significance marked with special prayers of thanksgiving. However they expressed concern that if Independence Day was celebrated on a Friday or Saturday, there would almost certainly be public desecration of the shabat, and, being a Jewish country, this should be avoided as official government policy (though no-one implies legislation for non-official desecration). In response, the Independence Day Law was modified, bringing these two days forward to the previous Thursday.

The problem then arose as to the significance of specific dates. Was there an intrinsic holiness in the date, 5th Iyar, on which the rabbinate proscribed special prayers giving thanks to God for the miracle of granting Jewish self-rule in the Land of Israel for the first time in 2,200 years, or are we able, via our elected representatives, to modify the date which God assigned, the day on which the miracle occurred? Initially, when the day was brought forward to the previous Thursday, many synagogues added the special prayers on the legislated day, Thursday, as well as on the "real" date, 5th Iyar, though, without elaboration, the religious emphasis was on the "real" date.

In the early eighties religious people rethought this issue and decided that the irreligious should consider this approach an affront. They, some rabbis reasoned, agreed to change the date because of our concern for the sanctity of the shabat, while we in essence ignore the earlier date which we "forced" them to adopt. As a result the custom was modified to completely ignore the "real" date and observe the legislated day.

This new mode seemed to be accepted to the satisfaction of nearly everyone. Until we switched to summer time. Now, when Independence Day fell on a Monday, the sounding of the Memorial Day siren would be just a few minutes after the end of the shabat.

This was not a concern at the time of the legislation. There was a good hour after shabat before the sounding of the siren. And if shabat is the problem, giving people time to reach the various ceremonies that evening without desecrating the shabat, why can't we, when the day falls on a Saturday night, the siren sound at 9 o'clock? This is not like having to pray at a fixed time. It's governed purely by the law and accepted convention based on it.


Next week is Lag baOmer, a day traditionally celebrated by lighting bonfires. The "central" bonfire is lit in Meron, near to the grave of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, the father of the Kabala, who passed away on this date some eighteen hundred years ago. The honour of lighting the main bonfire in Meron belongs to the Boyaner Rebbe. This privilege was purchased by the first Sadigura Rebbe, while still firmly sojourned in Austria, from the S'faradi guardians of Meron and Safed. The Rebbe bequeathed this honour to his eldest son, the first Boyaner Rebbe and to his progeny who lived in Poland.

Both in Meron and all over the country, many people, especially youngsters, will spend until the early hours of the morning around their fires. As a result, Lag baOmer has always been an official school holiday, even though it really has little, if any, religious or national significance.

This year Lag baOmer will be next Saturday night. For the first time, the Chief Rabbinate decided that, because of summer time, there may be desecration of shabat which will end a few minutes before 8:00 p.m. Some may light their fires earlier, or put finishing touches to the pyres. So the rabbis "decreed" that the bonfires should be lit on Sunday night, the night after the "real" traditional, not legislated, date. I doubt anyone from the Boyaner to the little kids in my street will put off the traditional day by twenty-four minutes let alone twenty-four hours.

The chief rabbis requested the [previous] minster of education to grant a second day off school for kids to recover from their [second] long night, just for this year. Though this was gazetted months ago, I'm not sure how many people knew about it until recently, leading to strong complaints to the "new" minster that parents of small kids are going to find it difficult to arrange child-minding on two sequential workdays. Why do we have this problem this year? Because, because of daylight savings, the night starts too late to suit the rabbis' whim or their [mis]understanding of their constituents psychology.


Not all countries around the temperate world change their clocks seasonally, but most do. Over the last few years people in some countries have realised the fallacy in the move and have chosen, either via referenda or through government edict, to terminate the habit.

We co-exist in a Jewish, though multi-faceted, society. I think I have outlined the disadvantages to both religious and to secular Israelis, or I really mean all Israeli society, of the unnecessity of continuing daylight savings time. It serves but the narrow interests of a small part our community.

22nd April, 2013    


* Mikve Married women of childbearing age visit the mikve at some frequency, ranging from monthly to annually. I won't go into detail here concerning the spread.

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