Source: The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/04/us/04religion.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
On the morning of April 8, 1953, a day he is certain more than a half-century later was a Wednesday, J. David Bleich walked outside his father’s synagogue in Lewistown, Pa. A high school senior, age 16, he was the youngest among a smattering of worshipers gathering in a rear yard beneath a clement sky.
On the morning of April 8, 1981, without doubt another Wednesday, Mr. Bleich climbed to the roof of a converted brownstone that doubled as a small synagogue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. By then, at age 44, he was a rabbi and a professor at Yeshiva University, and he had dozens of contemporaries beside him atop the building, all taking note of the especially brilliant day.
Rabbi Bleich remembers these stray days so precisely because of what he was doing on each one: paying homage to God as creator of the universe. Those April 8’s, like the April 8 that arrives next week, marked the holiday of Birchat HaChammah, named for the blessing of the sun that is recited after daybreak by observant Jews.
According to the celestial calculations of a Talmudic sage named Shmuel, at the outset of spring every 28 years, the sun moves into the same place in the sky at the same time and on the same day of the week as it did when God made it. This charged moment provides the occasion for reciting a one-line blessing of God, “who makes the work of creation.”
The astronomical metrics of Shmuel are by now considered inexact, but close enough so that the religious tradition persists, so that Jews like Rabbi Bleich believe that the sun next Wednesday occupies the same location in the firmament as it did when it was formed on the fourth day of Creation, which would have been Wednesday, March 26, of the Hebrew year 1, otherwise known as 3760 B.C.