Should Modern Orthodox Jews say Birchat HaChammah? Or is it a bracha levatalah?

While almost everyone is excited about the once-in-28-years opportunity to make a bracha, I wonder whether we should even be saying it; and whether to say it is a bracha levatala.

Let me lead off by noting this is not intended halacha lemaaseh, and that I have not looked sufficiently into the halachic sources involved for this post to be any more than an exploration. So, not halacha lemaaseh.

Part of the basis of saying Birchat HaChammah on erev Pesach this year is that it will be in the same position as it was at maaseh bereishit. Thus, the gemara just states:

Our Rabbis taught:2 He who sees the sun at its turning point,3 the moon in its power,4 the planets in their orbits,5 and the signs of the zodiac in their orderly progress,6 should say: Blessed be He who has wrought the work of creation. And when [does this happen]?7 — Abaye said: Every twenty-eight years when the cycle8 begins again and the Nisan [Spring] equinox falls in Saturn on the evening of Tuesday,9 going into Wednesday.

but Rashi explains Abaye {citing from a footnote in Soncino}:

As the sun and moon were created on the 4th day, the beginning of the 28 years cycle is always on a Wednesday which begins at the vernal equinox at 6 p.m. on Tuesday. This, according to computation coincides with the rise of Saturn, v. Rashi.

In needs to be in precisely that position -- after chatzos, e.g., it is already a question whether one may say it even bedieved.

This is a problem for Modern Orthodox people for three reasons:

1. Do we believe in a Young Earth or an Old Earth? This is all predicated on it being the time the earth was created, thus on it being a Tuesday going into Wednesday, as Rashi explains Abaye's statement. But what if we do not understand Bereishit to be literal in this manner? This is what someone asked Wolfish Musings. And the question may indeed be a good one, and we should say אין הכי נמי.
   
   
2. Continuing along the lines of the 28 year cycle, even if we assume a Young Earth, are we certain of the current year. Historians claim that there are some 165 years missing, a figure which does not divide evenly into 28.
   
   
3. And even if we have an accurate date based on seder Olam Rabba, what we have is an approximation. And that approximation is slightly inaccurate, and over the millennia the date has slipped. Indeed, it presumably slipped from the time of Maaseh Bereishit, but nowadays, the vernal equinox occurs in March, not in April.
   
   Now, we might say that Chazal have the ability to declare the times of the moadim, but here, the brayta explicitly refers to the astronomical phenomenon, and Abaye is just helping us out by giving an accurate enough (for his time, and a long time afterwards) description of that time. This is not like deciding when Pesach is, which we may define. Rather, the bracha only kicks in when we actually see the sun when it is in the beginning of its tekufah, and this is a physical phenomenon, not a halachic one.
   

To cite an article in the Jewish Week, by Howard Smith, an astrophysicist:

The problem is that the year is not 365.25 days long. It is less than that — 365.24219 days (as was indeed known to the rabbis, although not to this accuracy). The difference might not seem like much, but over the course of 2,000 years the discrepancy in dating is over two weeks. This is the reason that the event has slipped from the spring equinox, which the Talmud alludes to — normally March 20 — to the current date of April 8. And the celebration date will continue to drift toward the summer — surely a crisis for an event that we celebrate specifically because it is supposed to mark the original spring equinox.

Of course the paradox of blessing the sun runs much deeper. The sun was not created on March 20, either. Nor, for that matter, was it created on a Wednesday, nor 5769 years ago. It was created about 4.6 billion years ago, when the universe was about 9.1 billion years old. Just as we humans are born and mature over a period of years, so too the sun was born from an embryonic cloud of interstellar gas and dust, and gradually reached a level of maturity after hundreds of thousand of years of development. Its nuclear reactions developed not only on one special Wednesday, but over lots of them. It is irrational, is it not, to celebrate a cosmic event that did not take place?

He feels that there is a rejoinder, and indeed there may be one. But perhaps we should not be looking for a rejoinder. Why be defensive? Instead, perhaps we should have been more proactive, taken control of the situation, and made a birkat hachama on about March 20th, the actual date of the spring equinox! (Or perhaps in whichever year March 20th comes out on a Wednesday? This year it is a Friday...) This would not be a deviation from rabbinic tradition, but rather understanding the fundamentals of the halacha and boldly applying halachic principles to state what the true halacha should be. There have been parallels of this in recent times. E.g. reevaluating gemaras to double the shiurim; declaring murex trunculus to be techeiles.

Again, this is not a problem for those who are not Modern Orthodox, for there are no missing years; and there is no old earth; and we don't pay heed to maddah.

Now, there might be a few responses we can offer, to defend the position. I don't know that it is optimal to defend it, but we can try, anyway.

The first is to say that Chazal instituted the blessing, and we follow the established pattern of Chazal. Vesalacha la-avoneinu, ki rav hu -- it is the fault of the rabbis. Or rather, this is how the blessing, and its time, has been instituted, and we cannot go wrong by following that pattern.

I would respond that they did not establish this pattern, but the brayta just spoke of one who saw the sun in its tekufah. Abaye was helpful in identifying that time for those in his generation, but he was not contemplating its use almost 2000 years later, with the resulting shift!

And as above, declarations of zemanim work for moadim, but not for physical astronomical phenonomena.

Furthermore, as we see from various halachic sources, including Aruch HaShulchan, seif 5,

despite the fact that the brayta says to bless the same bracha on the levana and the various kochavim, we do not do it nowadays because we are not bekiin. That is, despite the fact that, as far as I can tell, calculating the tekufot of the zodiac signs is given as well in Pirkei deRabbi Eliezer, since we do not think we will be getting the accurate times, we do not say the beracha. If we think similarly, then perhaps the frum thing to do is to respectfully declare that we are not bekiin (even if this is a polite way of saying that they were not bekiin, to the level of predicting the date so many centuries later). As such, our treatment of the other items in the brayta sets the correct precedent.

My brother-in-law pointed out another answer which he saw in Artscroll's Birchas HaChamma book. Apparently (I didn't see it inside), Pachad Yitzchak asks this question, and says that there is no inyan of beracha levatala for ברכת השבח. I don't know enough about the topic to say if this is so, or not. But practically, after chatzos, they say not to say the beracha. And there are situations they tell you not to say it with shem and malchus.

Perhaps all us Modern Orthodox Jews should travel to the Grand Canyon for erev Pesach, so that we have two causes for oseh maaseh bereishis, so that we can avoid the safek. Or perhaps we should say it without shem and malchus. Or perhaps we should avoid it entirely.

Yeranen Yaakov is monitoring the weather, hoping that a cloudy or rainy day will not obscure the sun, eliminating the mitzvah. But perhaps we should be hoping for the opposite, that Hashem will save us from a massive beracha levatalah performed berov am by pouring a kiton shel mayim in our faces. Or perhaps better, we will have a far-off storm such that we see both the sun as well as thunder and lightning, so that we will have no safek bracha in play.

I would have liked to have heard some modern rabbonim (from various sectors) address this issue head-on, before the event.

Update: As Aton points out in the comment section, Rabbi Bleich addresses a similar point in his shiur on Birchat HaChamma, from the Yom Iyun that YU had on it. Go here, and listen at about the 53 minute mark.

His point, as far as I can understand it, is why don't we use the more accurate calculation of Rav Adda. And the answer was that then it would only occur once every few thousand years, and so they were metaken it in such a way as to give Jews the opportunity to bless it.

I am not sure it addresses the question posed above, and even if it does, I am not sure I buy the answer.

Firstly, if it is a matter of the missing 165 years, this was not something Chazal realized. They thought that even if it was an approximation, it was an approximation in which there was a cycle of 28 years since creation. Similarly, if we don't think that there is a young earth, but rather an old earth, once again, it is not some multiple of 28 years since some initial position.

Where his answer does address the lack of precision (which s point three above), I'm not sure I buy it. The fact is that there is some degree of precision involved. That is, it was what people in those days called the vernal equinox. Forget Abaye for a moment. The brayta said that the time is when it is in its tekufah, and it is in its tekufah, in lashon benei adam, during the vernal equinox. We also have this extra limitation of the 28 year cycle. That is, there is a tekufah every year, but the particular tekufah we pay attention to, as per Abaye, and as per Shmuel's calendar, is once every 28 years.

So with Shmuel's approximation, it was good enough, and close enough, to claim that this was in the same position. (How precise do we need it exactly?) And it was a tekufah. The problem given by the astrophysicist above, as I understand it, is that nowadays, it is no longer a tekufah. During the days of Abaye and Shmuel, the rough approximation was good enough that it fell out on a tekufah. But after the passage of almost 2000 years, it is no longer a tekufah, but it is rather off from the vernal equinox by a few weeks! We are no longer fulfilling the brayta! And don't tell me that Abaye was metaken it this way. He was metaken it this way for his century or so, when it indeed fell out during the date of the vernal equinox; and he was helping with the metzius.