How changing daylight saving time may impact Jews
Later sunrises could make it more difficult for Orthodox Jews to pray in the morning
Graphic by iStock/Collage by Benyamin Cohen
By Benyamin Cohen December 4, 2024
Albert Einstein famously discovered that time is relative, which is certainly the case if you’re in Arizona in March. While most of the country’s bleary-eyed denizens are moving the clock one hour ahead, Arizona folds its arms and watches.
The Grand Canyon State joins Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, which all operate on what’s known as “standard time” year-round. They don’t observe daylight saving time and never change the clock.
For the rest of the states, the twice-a-year clock change causes confusion, disruption and frustration. We lose sleep and it interrupts our circadian rhythms.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the two tech entrepreneurs that President-elect Donald Trump tapped to run a new Department of Government Efficiency, have suggested recently that maybe it’s time to eliminate the spring-forward, fall-back tradition of changing clocks.
Here’s a brief explainer of how messing with the current system could impact Jews.
Why some Jews are in favor of eliminating daylight saving time
Eliminating daylight saving time would mean earlier sunrises and earlier sunsets. That translates into it being light outside when walking to services on a winter Saturday morning, summer Shabbats that don’t stretch past 9 p.m., and the ability to start the Passover Seder while young children are still wide awake.
But other Jews support making daylight saving time permanent. David Prerau, author of Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time, provided many reasons: “It lowers traffic accidents, it lowers crime, it lowers energy usage, it’s better for public health.”
Prerau helped Congress tweak daylight saving time, extending it four weeks — starting three weeks earlier in March and ending one week later at the beginning of November. Those changes have been in effect since 2007, and we now have 238 days of daylight saving time per year. That means, for example, Passover will probably never fall during standard time, which allows for an earlier start to Orthodox Seders. Prerau said religious needs were one of the factors that led to what he called a “reasonable compromise.”
Other countries — like Musk’s native South Africa — do not follow daylight saving time. Mexico abolished daylight saving time in 2022.
Why some Jews oppose making daylight saving time permanent
Musk and Ramaswamy have only said they want to stop the twice-a-year clock changes, but did not elaborate if they intend to do that by eliminating daylight saving time or making it permanent.
Trump himself tweeted in 2019, the morning after daylight saving time began, that he was in favor of making it permanent. Senator Marco Rubio, who Trump has nominated to be the secretary of state, has been a vocal supporter of instituting daylight saving time year-round. He introduced a 2022 bill, called the Sunshine Protection Act, which was unanimously passed in the Senate. It later stalled in the House. Versions of the bill were introduced again in 2023, but were not brought to the floor for a vote.
Making daylight saving time permanent would address the efficiency problem that Musk and Ramaswamy hope to solve, but such a move would disrupt the lives of Orthodox Jews, who make up approximately 9% of the U.S. Jewish population and follow a strict regimen of prayers and other commandments that are required to be done at specific times of day.
Making daylight saving time permanent would mean later sunrises and later sunsets. The starkest example of this shift would occur in winter, when sunrise in some cities, especially in the middle of the country, will be after 9 a.m. (Detroit, for example, will get as late as 9:16 a.m.) For people who have to be at work, it will make praying in the morning at synagogue nearly impossible.
If such a change was implemented, workplaces may have to accommodate their Orthodox employees by allowing them time to pray in the middle of the morning. “It would definitely make it more challenging, and will limit the places where observant Jews can work,” said Rabbi Zalmen Gurevitz, of the Rohr Chabad Jewish Center at West Virginia University.
This challenge helps explain why Israel has a relatively short period of daylight saving time compared to other countries. “If sunrise is late, religious Jews have to delay going to work or pray at work — neither of which is a desirable situation,” Prerau said.
For myriad reasons, there are some years when Israel and the neighboring Palestinian Authority do not change their clocks on the same day. Compounding the complications, Gaza and the occupied West Bank have occasionally been unsynchronized. And in some Muslim countries, daylight saving time is temporarily halted during Ramadan so as not to delay the evening dinner after a day of fasting.
Do Musk and Ramaswamy have the authority to make the change?
Keeping daylight saving time year-round requires congressional action. Given that Republicans will control both the House and the Senate, this is not out of the realm of possibility.
Additionally, at least 19 states — Alabama, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Washington and Wyoming — have introduced legislation to make daylight saving time permanent, pending congressional approval.
But since the establishment of the Uniform Time Act of 1966, states are allowed to opt-out of daylight saving time, which is what Arizona and Hawaii have done. Lawmakers in California, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon, Washington and West Virginia have considered doing the same.
Look again at those two lists. Georgia and Washington, for example, appear on both. That’s because different legislative bodies in each state have introduced conflicting bills — one in favor of making daylight saving time permanent and one in favor of abolishing it.
That confounding legislation may help explain why the new Department of Government Efficiency wants to act.
Why daylight saving time was established
For many, standard time is a relic of agrarian society, when a farmer’s day was dictated by the sun. With the industrial revolution came the desire for daylight saving time to allow people more hours of sunlight to run errands after work, head to retail shops and exercise outdoors. It would also theoretically decrease seasonal depression and childhood obesity. (More sunlight means more time for after-school sports.)
One of the groups who initially lobbied for the change was the candy industry because longer hours of daylight would make it safer for children to go trick-or-treating on Halloween. During the course of the 20th century, around 70 countries instituted daylight saving time.
One group that opposed daylight saving time: television networks, which would prefer for it to get darker earlier, allowing for more hours of nighttime viewing. The week daylight saving time begins, ratings usually drop.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
