Throughout the ages, we have drastically changed the way we measure time. Our biblical ancestors counted the changing seasons; in medieval times, the reign of the current king set the pace.
Centuries weren’t in favor until just a few hundred years ago. The concept of a decade — the “Roaring Twenties,” the “Big Hair Eighties,” etc. — only came into existence during the past hundred years.
In recent years, technology has introduced us to smaller and smaller units of time. In 1981, the book “Soul of a New Machine” described what it takes to build a computer.
The engineers speak of the unit of time most relevant to them: nanoseconds. Each nanosecond is a billionth of a second. So instead of 1440 minutes in a day, we have 86 trillion, 400 billion nanoseconds in a day.
But “a minute is a still just a minute,” you say. Well, true; but a minute while you are asleep is different than a minute during which 500,000 tweets are sent. To read that many tweets — a minute’s worth — would take you nearly two months (19,200 minutes) of full time work.
We live at the convergence of multiple timeframes. Clocks rule our lives — like 24-hour clocks, the 40-hour work week, or the clock speed of our computer processors, which, when we’re waiting for our computers to do something, inevitably feel like they go too slow. Trying to juggle so many timeframes can leave us temporally overloaded.
Paul Ford wrote in Contents Magazine (issue 3) about the recent reliance on gadgets like Fitbit that measure our exercise patterns and the exact amount of foods we eat. He calls this the “quantified self movement” and says:
“And it seems like the quantified self movement is about our relationship with time, about the fact that we don’t know how much we exercised or what we ate, we can’t really perceive ourselves mechanically and in a world where there are so many units of time all at once, where there are so many timeframes. It’s really easy to lose track of when you are.”
Grounded in time
Judaism can help us tame this temporal confusion. Judaism, it turns out, is a way of life grounded in time.
As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel pointed out (in his book “The Sabbath”), Judaism’s lack of a home during the exile led to us a more portable form of religion and the sanctification of time instead of space.
Lacking soaring cathedrals or venerated holy sites, we built our existence on a calendar marked by sacred periods of time — the day long Shabbat, weeks of Sukkot and Pesach, as well as the counting of the Omer, etc.
Independent of centuries, decades, and nanoseconds, it is holy time, not holy space, that is the province of Judaism.
The Jewish understanding of time also introduced the world to exciting new possibilities. Previously, people understood time to be an endless, repeating cycle.
Judaism, too, still retains the cycle. That we refer to Sukkot as z’man simchateinu (the time of our rejoicing), and Shavuot as z’man matan Torateinu (the time of the giving of the Torah), and Pesach as z’man heruteinu (the time of our redemption to freedom) reminds us that certain possibilities occur more reliably at certain times of the year.
At the Pesach seder, many families in lands where Jews were oppressed would pack a suitcase and leave it by the door. This was not a symbolic act. They believed that were redemption to come, it would likely come during the “time of our redemption to freedom,” just as the Exodus did.
Even today, we refer to Purim and Chanukah as the time miracles were done for us, “ba’yamim ha’hem ba’zeman ha’zeh,” “in those (olden) days, at this time (of the year).”
Judaism added to notion of cycles the idea that time also could move forward. In his book, “The Gift of the Jews,” Thomas Cahill maintains that Judaism’s innovation led to singularly important developments.
“Since time is no longer cyclical but one-way and irreversible, personal history is now possible and an individual life can have value,” he wrote. “The Israelites, by becoming the first people to live — psychologically — in real time, also became the first people to value the New and to welcome Surprise. In doing this, they radically subverted all other ancient worldviews…
“The Jews gave us the Outside and the Inside — our outlook and our inner life. We can hardly get up in the morning or cross the street without being Jewish. We dream Jewish dreams and hope Jewish hopes. Most of our best words, in fact — new, adventure, surprise; unique, individual, person, vocation; time, history, future; freedom, progress, spirit; faith, hope, justice — are the gifts of the Jews.”
Judaism can keep us leaning towards the future with its myriad possibilities and the sense that change is possible.
In a world where “the times they are a-changing,” holy time like Shabbat can keep us grounded in a time frame that can best position us to create lives filled with a sense of meaning and a sense of purpose. After all, it’s about time.
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