“Once the month of Ab begins, we minimize our happiness.”

During the first nine days of the month of Ab, we prepare ourselves to mourn the destruction of the Bet haMiqdash, the great Temple of Jerusalem. To do this, we minimize our happiness by avoiding celebrations and abstaining from the consumption of what is considered luxurious food: meat and wine.

Why meat and wine? Because these foods were offered in the Bet haMiqdash as animal sacrifices (qorbanot) or wine libations (nisukhin). Thus, abstaining from these foods also expresses our longing for the Bet haMiqdash.

The Mishna in Ta’anit (26B) mentions the prohibition to eat meat and drink wine during the Se’udat haMafseqet, which is the meal right before the fast of Tish’a beAb begins. This is the custom of Yemenite Jews, who avoid eating meat and drinking wine only during the meal before the fast. Over time, most Jews extended these restrictions for a longer period. The Shulchan ‘Arukh (551:9) mentions three different customs:

1. Those who refrain from meat and wine from the 17th of Tamuz.
2. Those who refrain from meat from the beginning of the month of Ab.
3. Those who refrain from meat only during the week of the 9th of Ab.

MEAT In Ashkenazi communities, and in some Sephardic communities (such as the Sephardic Jews of Yerushalayim), people avoid eating meat also during the day of Rosh Chodesh, following the tradition of the Ari z”l. In most Sephardic communities, however, the tradition is to avoid eating after Rosh Chodesh. Meat and wine restrictions do not apply on Shabbat. On the contrary, during Shabbat, we have to eat meat in honor of the Seventh day. The restriction from meat also includes avoiding poultry. Consuming fish during the Nine Days is allowed.

A person who is sick or weak, or a nursing woman during the first thirty days after giving birth, is allowed to eat meat during these days. The rabbi’s advice that, when possible, they should eat chicken instead of red meat. Children are not subject to the restriction of meat. However, Rabbi Obadia Yosef recommends that one year before the Bar or Bat Mitzvah, once they better understand the meaning of mourning for the Temple, they should also avoid eating meat. If a Se’udat Mitzva, such as a Berit Mila, takes place during these days, it is allowed to serve meat. In the old days, in many communities, meat was not served at a Se’udat Mitzva during the first days of the month of Ab because the Shechita, the Kosher slaughtering of animals, was discontinued once the month of Ab began, and fresh meat was not available.

WINE The Ashkenazi custom is to refrain from drinking wine during the Nine Days. The Sephardim have three different traditions:

1. Those who refrain from wine for Nine Days.
2. Those who avoid wine only during the week of Tish’a beAb.
3. Those who do not follow any restriction from wine during the Nine Days.

The Mashadi community’s tradition is to refrain from eating meat and drinking wine once the month of Ab begins, except for Rosh Chodesh Ab and Shabbat.

Other alcoholic beverages, such as beer, are not forbidden during the Nine Days.

HAIRCUT AND SHAVING The Ashkenazi custom is to forbid shaving and cutting one’s hair during the three weeks. In most Sephardic communities, men avoid shaving and cutting their hair only during the week of Tish’a beAb. This is also the opinion of Shulchan Arukh.

In the Mashadi community and other Sephardic communities, men do not get a haircut from Rosh Chodesh Ab, but they are allowed to shave until the week of Tish’a BeAb. Haircut restrictions do not apply to women. Each person should follow his or her community’s tradition.

For more information,  see also this great article in Hebrew

For a more detailed summary of Syrian and all Sephardic traditions of the 9 days, watch this video.

In this text, I describe the four foundational harms of the phone-based childhood. These are profound changes to childhood caused by the rapid technological shift of the early 2010s. Each one is foundational because it affects the development of multiple social, emotional, and cognitive abilities.

•  The sheer amount of time that adolescents spend with their phones is staggering, even compared with the high levels of screen time they had before the invention of the iPhone. Studies of time use routinely find that the average teen reports spending more than seven hours a day on screen-based leisure activities (not including school and homework).
• The opportunity cost of a phone-based childhood refers to everything that children do less of once they get unlimited round-the-clock access to the internet.
• Social Deprivation: The first foundational harm is social deprivation. When American adolescents moved onto smartphones, time with friends in face-to-face settings plummeted immediately, from 122 minutes per day in 2012 down to 67 minutes per day in 2019. Time with friends dropped further because of COVID restrictions, but Gen Z was already socially distanced before COVID restrictions were put in place.
• Sleep Deprivation: The second fundamental harm is sleep deprivation. As soon as adolescents moved from basic phones to smartphones, their sleep declined in both quantity and quality around the developed world. Longitudinal studies show that smartphone use came first and was followed by sleep deprivation.
  • Sleep deprivation is extremely well-studied, and its effects are far-reaching. They include depression, anxiety, irritability, cognitive deficits, poor learning, lower grades, more accidents, and more deaths from accidents.
• Attention Fragmentation: The third fundamental harm is attention fragmentation. Attention is the ability to stay on one mental road while many off-ramps beckon. Staying on a road, staying on a task, is a feature of maturity and a sign of good executive function. But smartphones are kryptonite for attention. Many adolescents get hundreds of notifications per day, meaning that they rarely have five or ten minutes to think without an interruption.
  • There is evidence that the fragmentation of attention in early adolescence caused by problematic use of social media and video games may interfere with the development of executive function.
• Addiction: The fourth fundamental harm is addiction. The behaviorists discovered that learning, for animals, is “the wearing smooth of a path in the brain.” The developers of the most successful social media apps used advanced behaviorist techniques to “hook” children into becoming heavy users of their products.
  • Dopamine release is pleasurable, but it does not trigger a feeling of satisfaction. Rather, it makes you want more of whatever you did to trigger the release. The addiction researcher Anna Lembke says that the universal symptoms of withdrawal are “anxiety, irritability, insomnia, and dysphoria.” She and other researchers find that many adolescents have developed behavioral addictions that are very much like the way that people develop addictions to slot machine gambling, with profound consequences for their well-being, their social development, and their families.

When we put these four foundational harms together, they explain why mental health got so much worse so suddenly as soon as childhood became phone-based.

By Jonathan Haidt

The new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people mentally sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now.

Human brains are extraordinarily large compared with those of other primates, and human childhood is extraordinarily long, too, to give those large brains time to wire up within a particular culture. A child’s brain is already 90 percent of its adult size by about age 6. The next 10 or 15 years are about learning norms and mastering skills—physical, analytical, creative, and social. As children and adolescents seek out experiences and practice a wide variety of behaviors, the synapses and neurons that are used frequently are retained while those that are used less often disappear.

Brain development is sometimes said to be “experience-expectant,” because specific parts of the brain show increased plasticity during periods of life.

(3 to 10: Language)

You can see it with human children, who are able to learn languages quickly and take on the local accent, but only through early puberty; after that, it’s hard to learn a language and sound like a native speaker.

(9 to 15 : Identity)

There is also some evidence of a sensitive period for cultural learning more generally. Japanese children who spent a few years in California in the 1970s came to feel “American” in their identity and ways of interacting only if they attended American schools for a few years between ages 9 and 15. If they left before age 9, there was no lasting impact. If they didn’t arrive until they were 15, it was too late; they didn’t come to feel American.

Human childhood is an extended cultural apprenticeship with different tasks at different ages all the way through puberty. Once we see it this way, we can identify factors that promote or impede the right kinds of learning at each age. For children of all ages, one of the most powerful drivers of learning is the strong motivation to play.

Play is the work of childhood, and all young mammals have the same job: to wire up their brains by playing vigorously and often, practicing the moves and skills they’ll need as adults.

Kittens will play-pounce on anything that looks like a mouse tail. Human children will play games such as tag and sharks and minnows, which let them practice both their predator skills and their escaping-from-predator skills.

Adolescents will play sports with greater intensity, and will incorporate playfulness into their social interactions—flirting, teasing, and developing inside jokes that bond friends together. Hundreds of studies on young rats, monkeys, and humans show that young mammals want to play, need to play, and end up socially, cognitively, and are emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play

One crucial aspect of play is physical risk taking. Children and adolescents must take risks and fail—often—in environments in which failure is not very costly.

This is how they extend their abilities, overcome their fears, learn to estimate risk, and learn to cooperate in order to take on larger challenges later. The ever-present possibility of getting hurt while running around, exploring, play-fighting, or getting into a real conflict with another group adds an element of thrill, and thrilling play appears to be the most effective kind for overcoming childhood anxieties and building social, emotional, and physical competence.

The desire for risk and thrill increases in the teen years, when failure might carry more serious consequences. Children of all ages need to choose the risk they are ready for at a given moment. Young people who are deprived of opportunities for risk taking and independent exploration will, on average, develop into more anxious and risk-averse adults (snowflakes).

Human childhood and adolescence evolved outdoors, in a physical world full of dangers and opportunities. Its central activities––play, exploration, and intense socializing––were largely unsupervised by adults, allowing children to make their own choices, resolve their own conflicts, and take care of one another. Shared adventures and shared adversity bound young people together into strong friendship clusters within which they mastered the social dynamics of small groups, which prepared them to master bigger challenges and larger groups later on.

And then we changed childhood.

The Tree: Adversity and Antifragility

Example of the puppy approaching a big dog, then running away, and then approaching again:

• The puppy is dosing itself, adjusting its level of thrill/fear, and each time it grows a little more fearless.

Parents today:

• Don’t allow their kids to do anything dangerous (e.g., crossing the street).

Trees:

I offer these ideas for reforms, all of which aim to reverse the two big mistakes we’ve made: overprotecting children in the real world (where they need to learn from vast amounts of direct experience) and under protecting them online (where they are particularly vulnerable during puberty).

Young people and their parents are stuck in at least four collective-action traps. Each is hard to escape for an individual family, but escape becomes much easier if families, schools, and communities coordinate and act together. Here are four norms that would roll back the phone-based childhood. I believe that any community that adopts all four will see substantial improvements in youth mental health within two years.

No smartphones before high school

Each child thinks they need a smartphone because “everyone else” has one, and many parents give in because they don’t want their child to feel excluded. But if no one else had a smartphone—or even if only half of the child’s sixth-grade class had one—parents would feel more comfortable providing a basic flip phone or no phone at all.

No social media before 16

Each adolescent feels a strong need to open accounts on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms primarily because that’s where most of their peers are posting and gossiping. But if the majority of adolescents were not on these accounts until they were 16, families and adolescents could more easily resist the pressure to sign up. The delay would not mean that kids younger than 16 could never watch videos on TikTok or YouTube—only that they could not open accounts, give away their data, post their own content, and let algorithms get to know them and their preferences.

Phone-free schools

Most schools claim that they ban phones, but this usually just means that students aren’t supposed to take their phones out of their pockets during class. Research shows that most students do use their phones during class time. They also use them during lunchtime, free periods, and breaks between classes—times when students could and should be interacting with their classmates face-to-face. The only way to get students’ minds off their phones during the school day is to require all students to put their phones (and other devices that can send or receive texts) into a phone locker or locked pouch at the start of the day. Schools that have gone phone-free always seem to report that it has improved the culture, making students more attentive in class and more interactive with one another. Published studies back them up.

More independence, unsupervised free play and more responsibilities 

Many parents are afraid to give their children the level of independence and responsibility they themselves enjoyed when they were young, even though rates of homicide, drunk driving, and other physical threats to children are way down in recent decades. Part of the fear comes from the fact that parents look at each other to determine what is normal and therefore safe, and they see few examples of families acting as if a 9-year-old can be trusted to walk to a store without a chaperone. But if many parents started sending their children out to play or run errands, then the norms of what is safe and accepted would change quickly. So would ideas about what constitutes “good parenting.” And if more parents trusted their children with more responsibility—by asking their kids to do more to help out or to care for others—then the pervasive sense of uselessness now found in surveys of high-school students might begin to dissipate. It would be a mistake to overlook this fourth norm. If parents don’t replace screen time with real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity, then banning devices will feel like deprivation, not the opening up of a world of opportunities.

The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood – The Atlantic

by Daniel Kruger,  UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

May 8, 2018

Social media platforms are using the same techniques as gambling firms to create psychological dependencies and ingrain their products in the lives of their users, experts warn.

These methods are so effective they can activate similar mechanisms as cocaine in the brain, create psychological cravings and even invoke “phantom calls and notifications” where users sense the buzz of a smartphone, even when it isn’t really there.

“Facebook, Twitter and other companies use methods similar to the gambling industry to keep users on their sites,” said Natasha Schüll, the author of Addiction by Design, which reported how slot machines and other systems are designed to lock users into a cycle of addiction. “In the online economy, revenue is a function of continuous consumer attention – which is measured in clicks and time spent.”

Whether it’s Snapchat streaks, Facebook photo-scrolling, or playing CandyCrush, Schüll explained, you get drawn into “ludic loops” or repeated cycles of uncertainty, anticipation and feedback — and the rewards are just enough to keep you going.

“If you disengage, you get peppered with little messages or bonus offers to get your attention and pull you back in,” said Schüll. “We have to start recognizing the costs of time spent on social media. It’s not just a game – it affects us financially, physically and emotionally.”

Recreating the slot machine The pull-to-refresh and infinite scrolling mechanism on our news feeds are unnervingly similar to a slot machine, said Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist for Google who has been described as the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience.

“You pull a lever and immediately receive either an enticing reward (a match, a prize!) or nothing,” Harris wrote.

We cannot know when we will be rewarded, and more often than not we don’t find anything interesting or gratifying, much like gambling. But that’s precisely what keeps us coming back.

“The rewards are what psychologists refer to as variable reinforcement schedules and is the key to social media users repeatedly checking their screens,” said Dr Mark Griffiths, a professor of behavioural addiction and director of Nottingham Trent University’s International Gaming Research Unit.

“Social media sites are chock-a-block with unpredictable rewards. They are trying to grab users’ attentions … to make social media users create a routine and habitually check their screens.”

Like gambling, which physically alters the brain’s structure and makes people more susceptible to depression and anxiety, social media use has been linked to depression and its potential to have an adverse psychological impact on users cannot be overlooked or underestimated.

For instance, phone dependency, driven by high social-media usage, can lead us to think our phone is vibrating, or that we have received a message, even when we haven’t.

“Phantom calls and notifications are linked to our psychological craving for such signals,” said IHPI member Professor Daniel Kruger, an expert in human behavior, from the University of Michigan. “These social media messages can activate the same brain mechanisms as cocaine [does] and this is just one of the ways to identify those mechanisms because our minds are a physiological product of our brain.”

“There are whole departments trying to design their systems to be as addictive as possible. They want you to be permanently online and by bombarding you with messages and stimuli try to redirect your attention back to their app or webpage.”

ARTICLE

https://ihpi.umich.edu/news/social-media-copies-gambling-methods-create-psychological-cravings

THE SOCIAL DILEMMA , Netflix 2020 

Tristan Harris, former Google design ethicist and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, explains in the documentary that there are three main goals of tech companies:

1. The Engagement Goal: To increase usage and ensure users continue scrolling.
2. The Growth Goal: To ensure users are coming back and inviting friends, who in turn invite even more friends.
3. The Advertisement Goal: To make sure that while the above two goals are happening, the companies are also making as much money as possible from advertisements.

Harris summed this up with the warning: “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.”

THE FIRST ARMY OF ISRAEL

Our most precious possession is our children: we work for them, save money for them, and make every necessary effort to ensure that they lack nothing and have everything they need—and if possible, more. My question is: do we, as parents, consistently act with this goal in mind, or do we sometimes forget the importance of our children?

In the first parasha of this week, Mattot, the Torah tells us that the tribes of Reuben and Gad had a lot of livestock. Before entering the land of Israel, they asked Moshe to settle on the other side of the Jordan River in the territories of Sichon and Og, which were very fertile lands. Moshe initially refused. Why? Because the Jewish people had to face the powerful Canaanite nations militarily, and they needed a strong and solid army. These tribes constituted nearly 20% of the army, and their desertion would cause great frustration among the other tribes. Moshe asked them: “How can you settle in these lands and leave your brothers to fight without you?” Moshe demanded that they join the conquest war. The leaders of these tribes then told Moshe that they would not abandon the rest of the tribes: the plan was to settle their families in the new lands and quickly join the army of Israel, fight alongside their brothers, and then return to their families. These were the words they said to Moshe (beMidbar 32:16): “…in the lands of Og and Sichon ‘we will build pens for our livestock and cities for our children… we will leave our families there and immediately join the army.” Moshe accepted the proposal and responded affirmatively with these words (beMidbar 32:25): “All right, then, build the cities for your children and the pens for your animals, and join the army…”

MOSHE AND DR. FREUD

At this point, it is worth noting, with Freudian eyes, a small but very significant difference between what the leaders of these tribes said and what Moshe told them. The leaders of the tribes mentioned that they would build “pens to settle their animals and cities for their children.” But when Moshe responded to them, he mentioned the children first and then the animals. Keep in mind that at that time, cows and sheep were not pets: livestock was one’s capital, money, and work. Moshe noticed that these men, quite literally, put their money before their children!

Finally, after listening to Moshe, the leaders of the tribes realized their Freudian slip and told Moshe that they would do what he ordered them (beMidbar 32:25-26): “Our children, our women, and all our animals will stay there in the mountains of Gil’ad, while we prepare for war.” Now, they mentioned the children first, their families, and then the animals. Although this terrible difference in the scale of values is not explicitly discussed but occurs subconsciously, it seems they understood they were mistaken. It was enough to hear Moshe repeating what they said, but in the correct order of priorities, for them to learn the lesson.

URGENT vs. IMPORTANT

Surely, we all know that our children are more important than our work. Any father or mother we ask will obviously answer that they value their children much more than their material possessions. However, we parents do not always act in accordance with that. That is to say: I know it is very important to be with my children, to dedicate time to them, listen to them, play with them, “but I don’t have time.” I know I have to take an interest in them, talk about how their day was, and know what they are doing on the internet, “but I am so busy.” Thus, unintentionally and without planning, we have no time (or energy) left for “the most important thing in our lives.”

Sometimes, unintentionally, we put our children in a second category. I remember something funny but also sad: one of my friends in South America had a domestic employee to whom she entrusted her children, almost to raise them, but she did not allow her to use her washing machine because she did not trust her to wash the clothes without ruining them.

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

Sometimes, without realizing it, we repeat the history of our ancestors and do not invest the necessary time in our children. Surely, the men of Gad and Reuben knew perfectly well that their children were more important than their material possessions, but like almost all parents, they needed someone, in this case, Moshe, to remind them of the order of priorities.

Our compass, our reference, is the Torah. And every time we study it, it should clearly remind us that our children should come first.

SHABBAT SHALOM

Rabbanit Coty Bitton

מעשיך יקרבוך ומעשיך ירחקוך

ALL FOR MY CHILDREN Moshe Rabenu knows that his life will soon end. He also knows that his people, Am Israel, will need a leader to replace him. Who were the candidates to take Moshe’s place? The most natural thing at that time and in those circumstances would have been for Moshe’s sons to replace him. At the end of the day “all our sacrifice is for our children”. And Moshe might have thought that he deserved to see his sons following in his footsteps and be the next leaders of his people. Formally—and as the Jews saw in Egypt— a leader , a Pharaoh or a King,  establishes his own dynasty. Why would Moshe be different from any other political leader?  

MERIT or FAMILY Surprisingly, Moshe’s sons are not mentioned in the Tora as candidates for his replacement.  The Sages of the Midrash affirm that Moshe at first did think of his children as his natural  successors. How do we know? The Rabbis deduced this idea from the juxtaposition of the text that speaks of Tselofchad, and the text that speaks of Moshe’s replacement. Tselofchad had no sons. The daughters told Moshe that they deserved to inherit their father’s land. In the end, the Tora proves them right and Tselofchad’s daughters got their inheritance. The Sages indicate that at that time Moshe thought: “If the daughters of Tselofchad, that seemingly were unfit, ended up inheriting their father’s land, my sons, should also inherit my position of leadership, regardless of how fit they are for the job”.  At this point, and with an unusual absence of euphemisms, the Rabbis “reconstruct” God’s theoretical response to Moshe: “Your sons did nothing to deserve inheriting you (ישבו להם)! They did not attend the study house and did not make an effort to learn Torah.” In other words, Torah, study, intellectual and spiritual training, is not inherited from father to children like a piece of land. If there was no personal effort on the part of the children, inheriting automatically a position of leadership would be considered simply “nepotism.”

PROBATE COURT  At the end, HaShem, tells Moshe that the one who will succeed him will be Yehoshua, Moshe’s assistant. And again the Rabbis rationalized with their own words God’s decision: “Although he is neither your son nor your nephew, Yehoshua,[is your disciple] and he tried his best. During the years that he assisted you, Yehoshua would get up very early in the morning and show up at the House of Study (בית ועד). There, and before anyone else arrived, Yehoshua cleaned the floor, laid out the carpets and arranged the benches… he was willing to do any work that was necessary, regardless of whether or not that work was according to his status and prestige, for the sake of Tora and the people ….  Yehoshua stayed in the study house until late at night, and only left when everyone else had already left.” The comparison between Yehoshua and the sons of Moshe leaves no room for ambiguity. HaShem teaches Moshe – and through him to all of us – that we Jews belong to a “meritocratic” society: our own merits are more valuable than our inherited merits. Leadership positions are assigned on the basis of personal efforts and merit, by virtue of the individual’s talents, education, competence and specific aptitude for that particular position.

LAND AND LEADERSHIP.  Unlike a piece of land or a large fortune, Tora — and leadership in the realm of Tora — is NOT automatically inherited from father to son. The fact that my father is or was a great sage or a great leader does not make me, his son, a good man for the job.  And vice versa. It is possible that a great sage had a father who was not a great sage. Ultimately, it is up to one’s own effort. This is also how the great Jewish sage Aqabiya ben Mahalalel explained this idea to his son. When Aqabiya was about to die, his son asked him to “recommend” him to his colleagues, who were the most prominent rabbis and leaders of the Jewish people. “With your recommendation, dad, many doors are going to open for me, and I am going to be able to get close to the prestigious Rabbinical elite”.   But his father refused to recommend him to the Rabbis. His son asked him: “Did you find anything wrong with me? And his father answered “no”, but he added phrase that became one of the most important lessons the rabbis taught on this subject: “My son, it is not my recommendation that will give you prestige or a leadership position, but your actions”. In Hebrew: מעשיך יקרבוך ומעשיך ירחקוך “It will be your deeds and behavior, not my words, what will bring you closer or further away from the Rabbis.”

First Aliyah: Last week’s Parasha concluded with the story of the women of Moab and Midyan approaching young Jewish men to seduce them and induce them to practice idolatry through sexual rites. Pinehas executed one of the Jewish leaders on his own, without trial and a legal sentence. Our Parasha begins with God granting Pinehas a covenant of peace, (like a Presidential Pardon), and rewarding him for his actions granting him and his descendants the priesthood. God then commands the Jews to get ready to fight the Midianites, becuse their  provocation was considered an act of war. God orders Moshe and Elazar the Priest to take a census of all the men who are of age to go to war, that is, older than 20 years.  

Second Aliyah: The  number of all the men of the 12 tribes was 601,730, not counting the tribe of Levi.

Third Aliyah: Apart from serving as a census for enrollment in the Jewish army that will fight against the Midianites, this census also serves to start organizing the division of the lands that will soon be inherited in Israel. The land of Israel was to be divided among all who were counted in this census. And the geographic location of each tribe, the “provinces,” would be determined by lottery. The census of the men of the tribe of Levi, who did not go to war, nor were they going to have their own land, is also taken.  The Levites male were 23,000 counting from one month of life. This Aliyah concludes with the story of Zelofchad’s daughters approaching Moshe and telling him that their father had died, leaving only females , and they requested to receive their father’s portion in the land of Israel. Moses conveys this concern directly to God.

Fourth Aliya: In response to the request of Zelofchad’s daughters, Moshe now formulates by Divine command the laws of inheritance which includes the rights of daughters to inherit the land when there are no male descendants. After this episode, God tells Moses to climb to the top of Mount Abarim from where he will see the Promised Land before he dies, but he will not enter it. Moses asks God to appoint a worthy person to succeed him in leadership. The one chosen by God to replace Moshe is Yehoshua Bin Nun because of his reputation and his leadership abilities.  

Fifth Aliyah: The narration of the succession is interrupted, and the Tora focuses now to detail all the sacrifices that will be offered in the Tabernacle and once in Israel, in the Holy Temple . First, the daily sacrifice  “Tamid” is described, which was to be offered every day of the year, twice a day, including Shabbat, festivals and even Yom Kippur. Additional sacrifices for Shabbat and Rosh Chodesh, the beginning of the Jewish month, are also specified.

Sixth Aliyah: Describes the sacrifices offered on the festivities: Pesach, Shabuot, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Seventh Aliya: The sacrifices offered on the festivals of Sukkot and Shemini Atzeret are described here .