On a recent Friday afternoon, members of an Orthodox Jewish community in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn dashed up and down 13th and 14th Avenues, heading in and out of shops to secure the goods they needed before the late July sunset and the onset of the Sabbath that evening.
Roughly 200 miles south, leaders of prominent national Orthodox Jewish organizations were also keeping the sun’s timing front of mind. They had spent the weeks before Congress’s monthlong summer recess lobbying dozens of U.S. senators in Washington to maximize the nation’s daylight hours for their faith.
At issue is the Sunshine Protection Act, a bill that would make daylight saving time permanent, no longer requiring the twice-yearly change to “spring forward” and “fall back” an hour. Orthodox Jewish groups have joined other interest groups in successfully fighting off similar efforts, but this year may be different: The House of Representatives passed the bill earlier this month.
Making daylight saving time permanent, Orthodox leaders say, would disturb their community rituals and create logistical problems for Jews who work or attend school in the winter, when sunrise and sunset — which coincide with morning and evening prayers — would occur an hour later. For those who work secular jobs, praying nearly an hour later than usual would make it difficult to arrive at work on time, they argue.
Leaders also say the law could place elementary and middle school students of all faiths at higher risk of being hit by cars during their morning commutes, an argument that largely swayed lawmakers against making daylight saving time permanent in the 1970s.
And in New York, which is home to the country’s largest Orthodox Jewish population, the change could bring significant disruptions to the daily lives of hundreds of thousands.
“It’s definitely something that folks are concerned about within the Orthodox Jewish community,” said David Greenfield, a former city councilman and the chief executive officer and executive director of the Met Council, which fights poverty in New York’s Jewish communities. The bill’s advancement, he added, has created “the unusual coalition of the Hasidic Jew from Brooklyn and the farmer from South Dakota, who are working together to try to stop this legislation.”
In countering the legislation, Orthodox Jewish leaders have joined forces with those who share their opposition — other faith leaders, industry groups, sleep experts and agricultural workers.
The bill faces an unclear path in the Senate. Several senators have already hesitated to support it or said they would vote against it. But President Trump, who often railed against daylight saving time, has lobbied Republican lawmakers to support the measure.
Still, after the Sunshine Protection Act passed the House, leaders with Agudath Israel and the Orthodox Union, another national Orthodox Jewish organization, redoubled their efforts and continued to meet with Democrats and Republicans in the Senate to reiterate their position.
“We’ve heard from rabbis, from parents, who are very concerned,” said Rabbi A.D. Motzen, the national director of government affairs for Agudath Israel of America, one of the foremost Orthodox advocacy organizations that has helped lead opposition to the bill. “They’re not looking at studies, they’re not looking for position statements of organizations. They are thinking about their own child going out in the dark, in the cold.”
Congress has passed legislation making daylight saving time permanent, but the measure was short-lived: In 1974, after widespread opposition from parents who feared the time change was leading to increased traffic accidents involving their children, lawmakers reversed course. In 2005, Congress voted to extend daylight saving time by one month.
Hawaii, most of Arizona and a handful of U.S. territories, including Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands, abide by standard time year-round and do not change their clocks. More than a dozen states have enacted legislation that would establish permanent daylight saving time, but the move cannot fully take effect without federal legislation.
The momentum behind the current push has caused opponents to step up their efforts and work together. Longtime secular opponents of making daylight saving time year-round have found allies in the Orthodox Jewish organizations because of their shared interpretation of how time functions in public life.
“Whether you’re a Christian, Muslim or Jew, you would prefer that the clock be honest about the time of day,” said Jay Pea, the founder of Save Standard Time, which advocates adopting year-round standard time. “Some people think that the time is just a random number we pull out of the sky, but it is, in fact, a specific number that we measure out of the sky.”
In Borough Park, reactions to the legislation’s advancement were somewhat muted. Many residents said they were not aware that daylight saving time could become permanent. Some business owners said they knew of the bill and opposed it.
But even as some Orthodox leaders in New York acknowledged that keeping daylight saving time would disrupt their daily schedules, adjusting to it might be difficult but not impossible.
“It’s particularly inconvenient for commuters who come in from the suburbs because usually they say their prayers and then commute,” said Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz, who is the senior rabbi of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. But, he added, “there are people who live in Jewish communities farther north than we do, and they figure out a way to accommodate it.”
Should the bill become law, he said, “everyone can figure out how to accommodate it.”
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