Jewish Time Travel - Rosh HaShanah 5786, Day 2

When are you? The second installment in the "Holiness in Time" series.

(If you have not already read the first installment in the series, you might want to do so: Judaism Gives You More Time - Rosh HaShanah 5786, Day 1.)

Many of you know that my father is a mathematician. When I was in junior high, he gave me a copy of a classic satirical novella from the 19th century by Edwin Abbott Abbott called Flatland. In it, the author describes a two-dimensional world, where the protagonist, a square, lives. This square takes a journey to visit Lineland (one dimension) and Spaceland, a three-dimensional place. While it is meant to be a commentary on how we grow accustomed to seeing only what we most readily perceive, the joy of reading the book is mostly trying to imagine how geometrical shapes from different dimensions understand each other.

I would like to propose the following: the most essential dimension of Judaism is time. Yes, of course we live and function in three-dimensional space. But the way our ritual works, the way we relate to our history and our text, all of that takes place in the hours of every day, in the decades of our own personal memories, and in the millennia of Jewish history.

Put another way, when you look at our tradition in a certain way, Jewish people doing Jewish things takes place simultaneously in multiple different time frames: the current moment, the current year, and in multiple eras throughout our history at all times. When we are engaged in our religious tradition we are seeing ourselves through the dimension of time - a fabric woven of individual and collective past, present, past and future.

What we do today is directly connected to Moshe Rabbeinu on Mt. Sinai, and even back to Avraham Avinu, Abraham our Patriarch, who, according to traditional chronology, lived around 3800 years ago. Furthermore, there is a well-known rabbinic tradition out there (e.g. Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 28b), that Avraham kept all of the mitzvot of the Torah, even though he lived 500 years before Moshe climbed Mt. Sinai to receive it. That is, the Torah existed before God gave it to us, and Avraham somehow knew it and kept it.

Now, of course that’s a little ridiculous, because it would have made no sense for Avraham, for example, to avoid eating ḥametz on Pesaḥ, since he lived hundreds of years before his two million Israelite descendants were liberated from slavery.

Most of us were taught in Hebrew school that Avraham was the first Jew; a more accurate statement is that he is the first monotheist. But if indeed he WAS the first Jewish person, then of COURSE he kept Pesaḥ! He must have had at least four sets of dishes and two sinks, in his tent, because, well, you know, that’s what Jews do. The suggestion is that Torah is timeless.

But perhaps a better visualization of the way that Judaism functions in the dimension of time is to think of another book which I read in my childhood, Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 novel, A Wrinkle in Time. The book features time travel by means of a device called a “tesseract,” which folds time upon itself like a piece of paper, so different points in time touch each other.

And that is an apt metaphor for Jewish practice: when you do anything Jewish, you are actually folding the space-time continuum so that you are functioning in multiple points in history at once.

Consider hearing the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, which we did a few minutes ago. How does the shofar make you feel? Anxious? Triumphant? Proud? Reflective? Aware? Joyful? Well, depending on where in time you are, it could be all of those things.

Let me explain: the Torah describes this day not as Rosh Hashanah, literally the head of the year, but as “Yom Teru’ah,” a day of shouting for joy. We know the word “teru’ah” as being the name for the 10-12 staccato blasts, one of the three basic motifs of shofar-blowing. But the word “teru’ah” comes from the Hebrew verb “lehari’a” להריע meaning “to shout with joy.”

In some places in the Torah, “teru’ah” means shouting for joy, and in others it refers to blasts on a horn, which can call us to battle or call us to God. There are shofarot sounded when Moshe goes up Mt. Sinai to receive the Torah, and there are shofarot sounded when, in the book of Joshua, the Israelite troops cause the walls of Jericho to come a-tumblin’ down. Right from the outset, the sound of the shofar can evoke joy, triumph, or anxiety.

Psalm 150, which we sing every morning, identifies the shofar among a small band of other instruments, which were used in ancient times while the Temple was standing in Jerusalem. These instruments, including the shofar, were played during the Temple service, even on Shabbat, as our ancestors were gathered to witness the Kohanim / priests perform sacrifices in the Temple. So perhaps the sound of the shofar connects us to this ritual, which ceased about 2,000 years ago, when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in the year 70 CE.

Let’s jump to the 3rd or 4th century CE, when the rabbis of the Talmud (Rosh Hashanah 16a-b), identified the shofar as reminding us that we are bound to God, like the ram offered up in place of Isaac in the passage of Torah we read today. Also, they claim that the shofar sounded at the start of the new year will confuse the Satan, the Accuser who brings claims against the people of Israel in the heavenly court at this time of year. The shofar is therefore protecting us from evil. Maybe the shofar blasts make us feel safe.

Moving forward another millennium: Maimonides, writing in the 12th century in Egypt, who tells us that the shofar is meant to wake us up, to remind us to examine our deeds in this season of teshuvah / repentance:

Wake up you sleepy ones from your sleep and you who slumber, arise. Inspect your deeds, repent, remember your Creator. Those who forget the truth in the vanities of time and throughout the entire year, devote their energies to vanity and emptiness which will not benefit or save: Look to your souls. Improve your ways and your deeds and let every one of you abandon his evil path and thoughts.

Perhaps the shofar reminds us to be aware of ourselves as we seek repentance.

Sometimes when I hear the shofar, I am transported to my youth, to Congregation Beth Israel in North Adams, Massachusetts, when I am struggling to see the person up front blowing the shofar, and I am struck with the wonder of this curious, ancient and powerful sound.

My earliest synagogue memories are from Congregation Beth Israel in North Adams, Massachusetts. This is the old building that I remember; the congregation has since moved. This photo was taken by Randy Trabold, the much-beloved photographer of the North Adams Transcript.

So where are you when you hear the shofar? Better put, WHEN are you? Are you at Mt. Sinai, trembling in fear at the base of the mountain? Are you at Jericho, celebrating the Israelites’ return home to the land of Israel following hundreds of years in slavery? In ancient Jerusalem, filled with awe at the sight of the Temple service? Are you heeding the call of Maimonides to examine your soul? Are you right now, allowing the shofar to move you to seek teshuvah in the current moment?

***

More than two decades ago, when I was in cantorial school at the Jewish Theological Seminary, I wanted to go hear a famous cantor at an Orthodox synagogue that was way across Manhattan. It was Shemini Atzeret, and so I walked from Morningside Heights, diagonally through the entire length of Central Park, to Fifth Avenue Synagogue on the East Side. The cantor I wanted to hear, alas, was not there that day. But one of the illustrious members of this congregation was Elie Wiesel. He sat up front, just to the left of the bimah, in the front row.

And during Yizkor, I simply could not take my eyes off of him. I watched him swaying in prayer, eyes closed, deep within himself. This person who was the most visible Shoah survivor in the world, the one who had dedicated his life to telling the stories of mass murder and destruction and torture and the greatest inhumanities carried out by people on other people, was wrought with emotion and memory.

And all I could think of as I voyeuristically observed Elie Wiesel during Yizkor was, “Where is he? And when is he? Where is he right now? Sighet, Romania, where he grew up? Auschwitz? Buchenwald?”

***

Beth Shalom is a Conservative synagogue. What does it mean to be a Conservative Jew? It is not, as some might think, merely about being neither Orthodox nor Reform. Rather, it is to understand how what we do today as Jews is both a product of and firmly rooted in the continuum of Jewish history. It is to see not just what we are doing right now, but also the connected events in those folded sheets of time.

The origins of the Conservative movement are in a group of rabbis in German-speaking lands in the mid-19th century who, although initially part of Reform, left to form a new ideological camp known loosely as the “Positive-Historical school.”

What was the issue that caused them to leave Reform? It was an argument at the 1845 conference of Reform rabbis in Frankfurt at which Rabbi Zecharias Frankel and Rabbi Abraham Geiger debated whether prayer should be conducted in Hebrew or in German. Rabbi Geiger, the standard-bearer of Reform, argued for German: the Jews don’t understand Hebrew, he said, and German is the elegant modern language of philosophy and science. But Rabbi Frankel could not compromise on this, and put all his chips on the language of the Torah, the tongue which binds us to God.

The language of the Scripture is a constant reminder of our Covenant with God. These various bonds and reminders resemble the sheaf of arrows in the following parable: As long as they remain bound together a sheaf of arrows is unbreakable, but as soon as single arrows are removed from the sheaf it will quickly fall apart…

Hebrew, in fact, is so essential to our service that its use should have been secured by [halakhic] law; had anyone ever thought of abandoning the Hebrew language, such a law would certainly have been passed.

But Rabbi Frankel missed the obvious. The reason we pray primarily in Hebrew here at Beth Shalom is because Hebrew connects us across times, like the tesseract in A Wrinkle in Time.

Rabbi Zacharias Frankel, 1801-1875.

This is the language of the Torah from 3 millennia ago, the language of the Mishnah from 1,800 years ago, the holy tongue / leshon qodesh in which Rashi and Rambam and all our medieval scholars wrote their most significant works within the last 1,000 years, the language which is the living discourse of the State of Israel. It is the conduit through which time flows, the medium of ritual, of lifecycles, of text learning, of communication, of everything that connects our hours to our days to our months and years and centuries and millennia.

Two thousand years after our ancestors were scattered from our land, we held onto this language. And it enables us to live and communicate in the past, present, and even future at the same time.

When we pray, or bestow a Hebrew name upon a newborn, or hear a groom recite to his bride, “Harei at mequdeshet li betaba’at zo kedat Moshe veYisrael,” “Behold, with this ring you are consecrated to me as my wife according to the laws of Moses and the people of Israel,” we are connecting ourselves to our ancestors and our descendants in the same moment.

When we say, in the context of death, “Tehi nishmatah tzerurah bitzror haḥayyim,” “May her soul be bound up in the bond of life,” we are saying, the soul of every Jew is tied together across the ages; the bond of life stretches infinitely in either direction to include us all, our memories, our love, our grief, our wisdom.

***

How can this framing, that the essential dimension in Judaism is time, help us be better Jews, and better people?

Hourly:

Every hour of the day brings a new opportunity to insert a bit of holiness into our lives. The timebound mitzvot which create a framework for our days in prayer, in wrapping ourselves up in tallit and tefillin, in acknowledging the gratitude for our food, in seeing something wondrous and marking it with an appropriate berakhah, or your own thoughtful reflection. Our tradition allots a particular time for everything, and it is up to us to take the cue.

Daily:

We are reminded that each new day is a canvas on which we paint our deeds. We have the choice every day to treat the people around us with respect and honor, and as we go through our days to elevate the holiness between people. We greet every morning by saying, “Modeh ani lefanekha,” grateful am I to You for the opportunity for this new day, and we close each day by asking for God to spread over us a sukkat shalom, a sukkah of peace for protection through the night.

Weekly:

We count every day toward Shabbat, as we ascend a little bit in qedushah / holiness each day toward the high point of the week, when we set aside 25 hours as a time apart, a “palace in time,” in the memorable descriptor of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Monthly:

We mark the arrival of each new month with Psalms of joy. And as we roll through seasons, learning and growing and maturing, our festivals / Yamim Tovim bring us back to our ancient story and give us the imperative to seek freedom and celebration and repentance and Torah throughout the year.

Yearly:

We complete the cycle of the five books of the Torah each year, and are in constant dialogue with it as our story, our laws, and our wisdom are revealed to us throughout our lives. And as the years tick by, we acknowledge every seventh year as a Sabbatical year to remember that all of God’s Creation deserves some rest.

Decades:

These are the measures of our lives. As we age and watch our families grow and our children marry and have children of their own, we measure ourselves against our goals, our Matriarchs and Patriarchs, our achievements, our striving to live holy lives. We mark the turning of our lives with berit milah, baby namings, bar/bat mitzvah, weddings, funerals.

Centuries:

We witness Judaism developing and changing across the ages, as our people have moved from place to place and seen the rise and fall of empires, expulsions and new lands, cataclysms and triumphant victories of spirit, all while carrying our Torah and traditions with us.

Millennia:

We look back over broad swathes of our history, and connect our current moment with our illustrious past. We gaze back to Moshe Rabbeinu at Mt. Sinai; to the rabbis who wrote the Talmud; to Rashi and Rambam and to the brilliant scholars who walk this earth today. We boldly enter the next millennium, yearning for peace, praying for an end to oppression and hatred.

Judaism never takes place solely in the here and now; everything that we do as Jews traverses the ages. We are all links in the chain connecting our past to our future.

Something about this historical awareness has worked. In all the chaos we have faced in our history, we are still here. Through dispersion and persecution, genocide and terrorism, we are still here. In every generation we understand not only (as the text from our Passover Haggadah states) that our enemies rise up against us, but also that ours is an eternal covenant with God that has and will withstand time’s inexorable march forward.

When are you now?

***

The third installment in the “Holiness in Time” series:

There is Not Enough Time to Raise Jewish Children - Kol Nidrei 5786