If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know that I’ve been working on my Zmanim-WP plugin for WordPress for a while now. This blog series is designed to help you dig deeper into the plugin and understand what it does, how it works, and whether it’s right for your needs.

“Dancing in the Dark”

If part 1 was focused on the zmanim for the start of the day; and part 2 looked afternoon times, it stands to reason that today we’ll check out the shortcodes that help calculate the end of the day.

• Start of Bain HaShmashot ([zman_bain]) – The time between sunset (“shkia”, in halachic terms) and night (“tzait hakochavim”) is sort of a halachic no-man’s-land, and therefore a lot of things that can only be done during the day (or at night) are no longer permitted. For this reason you need to know when this time is to avoid accidentally crossing a line.
• Tzait HaKochavim ([zman_tzait]) – The time when 3 stars are visible in the sky, signifying the arrival of “night time”
• sunset ([zman_sunset]) – Nautical sunset, also called “shkia”.

The above three are still “regular” zmanim – things that one might expect to see on a sheet of times. The last two (for this week) are “special” zmanim that I’ve included in the plugin because they are so darn useful:

• earlyshkia ([zman_earlyshkia]) – The earliest shkia for that week (see more on this below).
• lateshkia ([zman_lateshkia]) – The latest shkia for that week (see more on this below).

I’ll elaborate on these more in their own specific section.

Same as the other posts, these shortcodes can be used as-is, or with the options described in the first post of the series.

Examples:

• [zman_bain date="saturday"]
• [zman_tzait date="saturday" dateformat="g:i:s a"]
• [zman_sunset offset=-20]
• [zman_earlyshkia dateformat="g:i a"]

A Matter of Opinion

Bain HaShmashot and Tzait haKochavim require you to select a shita – a Rabbinic opinion – for it’s calculation. I plan to elaborate on each of these items in another series, but some details can be found on the KosherJava documentation site: https://kosherjava.com/zmanim/docs/api/com/kosherjava/zmanim/ComplexZmanimCalendar.html#getBainHashmashosRT13Point24Degrees()

• Start of Bain HaShmashot ([zman_bain])

  “bainHashmashosRT13Point24Degrees”,

  “bainHashmashosRT58Point5Minutes”,

  “bainHashmashosRT13Point5MinutesBefore7Point083Degrees”,

  “bainHashmashosRT2Stars”,

  “bainHashmashosYereim18Minutes”,

  “bainHashmashosYereim3Point05Degrees”,

  “bainHashmashosYereim16Point875Minutes”,

  “bainHashmashosYereim2Point8Degrees”,

  “bainHashmashosYereim13Point5Minutes”,

  “bainHashmashosYereim2Point1Degrees”

• Tzait HaKochavim ([zman_tzait])

  “tzais72”,

  “tzaisGeonim3Point7Degrees”,

  “tzaisGeonim3Point8Degrees”,

  “tzaisGeonim5Point95Degrees”,

  “tzaisGeonim3Point65Degrees”,

  “tzaisGeonim3Point676Degrees”,

  “tzaisGeonim4Point61Degrees”,

  “tzaisGeonim4Point37Degrees”,

  “tzaisGeonim5Point88Degrees”,

  “tzaisGeonim4Point8Degrees”,

  “tzaisGeonim6Point45Degrees”,

  “tzaisGeonim7Point083Degrees”,

  “tzaisGeonim7Point67Degrees”,

  “tzaisGeonim8Point5Degrees”,

  “tzaisGeonim9Point3Degrees”,

  “tzaisGeonim9Point75Degrees”,

  “tzais60”,

  “tzaisAteretTorah”,

  “tzais72Zmanis”,

  “tzais90Zmanis”,

  “tzais96Zmanis”,

  “tzais90”,

  “tzais120”,

  “tzais120Zmanis”,

  “tzais16Point1Degrees”,

  “tzais26Degrees”,

  “tzais18Degrees”,

  “tzais19Point8Degrees”,

  “tzais96”,

  “tzaisBaalHatanya”,

  “tzais50”

Meanwhile, Sunset ([zman_sunset]), earlyshkia ([zman_earlyshkia]), and lateshkia ([zman_lateshkia]) don’t require any additional considerations.

Early and Late?

It’s not uncommon to want to set a time – for afternoon prayers, as an example – to be x minutes before sunset. The problem is that this time moves throughout the week – as much as a minute or even 2 per day!

To make things more complicated, part of the year the earliest time will be on (or closer to Sunday; at a different time of the year it will be on (or closer to) Thursday.

Shuls end up in a situation where they either have different times through the week (which is both confusing to the congregation and leads to many showing up late), OR they hedge their bets and set a time that’s leisurely at the start of the week but becomes faster and faster as the time for sunset gets shorter.

To alleviate this, I created two shortcodes.

• earlyshkia ([zman_earlyshkia]) will look at all the sunset times from Sunday through Thursday, and return the earliest one.
• lateshkia ([zman_lateshkia]) will, as the name implies, look at all the sunset times from Sunday through Thursday and return the latest one.

Depending on your synagogue’s needs, you might need one or the other. And it’s important to note that both shortcodes also use the offset= option. This allows you to set a service time that’s a set number of minutes before (or after) the earliest (or latest) sunset of the week.

As I said in the last post, I know that this can feel like a lot. Use the codes that make sense, with the options that you need. If you have questions, you know where to find me.

Until next time!