Torah
April 4, 2008
Time Bound
Rabbi Elissa Sachs-Kohen
Special to the Jewish Times
Rabbi Sidney Greenberg tells this story: A man goes to Israel for a vacation. As he walks down the street, he realizes that he has forgotten his watch. He stops a man and asks for the time.
“Sorry,” the man says, “I don’t own a watch.”
“You don’t own a watch?! How do you ever know what time it is?”
“Well, during the day I ask someone. And at night, I have my shofar.”
“What do you mean? How does a shofar help you tell time?”
“Well, if I wake up in the middle of the night and I want to know what time it is, I stick my head out the window and blow the shofar. Invariably, one of my neighbors yells,” Quiet! What are you doing blowing the shofar at 3:45 in the morning?!?!”
I would imagine that very few of us use a shofar on a regular basis for time-telling. More likely, when we want to know the time, we look at our watches, our cell phones or PDAs. It’s hard in our digital age not to know precisely what time it is. And that’s important because for most people I know, time is a factor over which we try endlessly to have control and more often than not feel that we have none. I so frequently hear people mourning the time they do not have. “I wish I could ... X ... but I just don’t have time.” For all the time- saving devices we devise, we still don’t feel that we are in charge of our own time.
This week our Torah portion teaches that in fact, we COULD feel just the opposite. In addition to the regular parsha, Taazi’a, we read a few verses from Exodus because it is Shabbat HaChodesh, one of the special Shabbatot preceding Passover. The passage begins, “The Eternal One said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt: This month shall mark for you the beginning of the months; it shall be the first of the months of the year for you.” On the surface these words are simply a lesson about the calendar, God teaching the Jewish people which month will be first. But the classical Midrash digs deeper.
Exodus Rabbah, a midrashic text, imagines a conversation between God and the ministering angels. The angels ask when God plans to fix the holy days and God tells them that going forward, that will be Israel’s job. God goes on to say, “Formerly the festivals were in My hands ... but hereafter they are entrusted to you [the Jewish people], they are in your realm. Should you say yes, it will be yes and if no, no.” With these words, God turned over to the people something holy and precious –– time itself.
In symbolic terms, this teaches that though we might feel that time is out of our control, beyond our ability to regulate, in fact we can choose to say yes or no –– to make time our own or not. The way that we think about time, the way that we choose to fill it (or not fill it), the way that we mark the seasons of our lives, all these are in our hands, says God in the Midrash.
Judaism is all about taking time into our own hands and making it meaningful, deep and holy. We have holidays to mark the seasons, Shabbat to mark the weeks, even different services to mark the different times of our days. It is up to us to say yes or no. We can see all those Jewish time markers as simply more obligations that require time we don’t feel we have. Or we can see them as the means by which we create the time we have here on earth, the ways that we shape the moments of our lives.
No matter how controlled we feel by our appointment books, cell phones and PDAs, this week’s Torah portion teaches us the essential lesson that time is in our hands. How will you choose to use it?