Marking Time 4/8/24
I want to talk about time. Last week felt like a crescendo of momentous events. I celebrated a birthday and received the longest and most thoughtful birthday card from one of my children. Parental victory! On Saturday, we read the same Parasha from my daughter Evie’s Bat Mitzvah last year, marking the anniversary of another proud parental moment. Then, the pendulum swung. On Sunday, April 7th, we marked the six month anniversary of the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. Strike that. I’m not saying six months, or 24 weeks, or X days or Y hours. We are now counting the captivity of our hostages in annual terms. They have literally been in captivity for one half of an entire year. Then today, we embark upon a new week with an awe-inspiring solar eclipse in the US. Even for those that normally avoid waxing philosophical, it seems an inescapable reminder of how vast the universe is and how small mankind is; how little time and space we have actually occupied; and the magnitude of highs and lows humanity can experience in such a short period of time.
So, time. A more primitive concept of time was marked when mankind began to recognize the seasons, and then our circadian rhythm, as we traveled through days and nights. We call this cyclical time. Picture a watch, with its hands moving around a dial, just as the Earth rotates the Sun. Time becomes a given, an eternal recurrence. Human philosophy is then laid on top of this time. All of our myths and philosophies about birth, death, religion and the messy aspects of life are the gauzy layer of chaos that sits upon this unchanging order of time.
Judaism employs cyclical time. With the eclipse, it seems apropos to note that our calendar is marked by the phases of a lunar month and solar year, which dictate our daily prayers and holidays. But Judaism has another revolutionary concept of time (check out Yerushalmi’s “Zachor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory”), often referred to as linear time. The Torah fixed the moment when linear time began: when G-d told Abraham to leave his land and go to a new one. The concept of time as a journey, as a way of traveling towards a destination, began. The narrative of time now had a beginning, a middle and an end.
It was a revolutionary concept because it ran counter to some of the greatest philosophical thinking. Marx said that humans are determined by economics, like class and land ownership; Spinoza by the circumstances of their birth; and Freud by early childhood experiences. But when G-d told Abraham to leave his father’s house, he was really telling him to abandon everything that determined the future. Leave that world and embark on a journey of freedom.
While my birthday on the Gregorian calendar has passed, my Jewish birthday is near, and it’s customary on this day to impart a bracha, a blessing, on others. So, I wish you all the gift of time. Time to live your lives to the fullest: health, happiness, success and appreciation. I wish a time in which tomorrow will be unlike yesterday, and radically better than today. I wish that this concept of time, which itself has generated whole sets of concepts that would have been otherwise unimaginable (originality! creativity!) is appreciated. And I wish that this horrible chapter of time, where our brothers and sisters are held in captivity, soon ends. I wish that the hostages are able to embark on their own journey of radical freedom, marked by a full life filled with meaning.
Am Yisrael Chai
Kelly