Walking Through Time (Re’eh/Elul)

Walking Through Time (Re’eh/Elul)

        I would like to spend some time, today, thinking about time. 

We are standing here at a meeting-point of two cyclical, calendrical moments. The first is our Torah portion, Parashat Re’eh, with all its anticipation for the Israelites entering into the Promised Land, and its call into its own future to return, again and again, to the Temple. The other is the moment of the year we are in. We are about to begin the Month of Elul, the month leading up to Rosh HaShanah, which has its own particular obligations. It is another kind of anticipation. With the High Holy Days and the sense of looming judgment, we are invited to spend the Month of Elul preparing ourselves: to reflect on the year we’ve had, the lives we’ve had - the decisions we’ve made along the way - and to do “teshuvah” with one another. Teshuvah is repentance - it is making up for ways we might have wronged one another - but the language we use, teshuvah, means “returning”. 

We return and we return. The Torah portion says: return, continuously, to the Temple (this structure which does not exist anymore). The month of Elul says: return, continuously, to the better version of yourself. 

        It is nearly impossible to talk about time without resorting to metaphors. Time is a path we walk on. It is a commodity we spend - or waste. It is a person we race against, who waits for no-one, or who sometimes presses on us. It is not only a question of English idioms. A favourite Talmudic quote of mine (Brachot 64a) has Rabbi Avin haLevi proclaim:

כׇּל הַדּוֹחֵק אֶת הַשָּׁעָה - שָׁעָה דּוֹחַקְתּוֹ

וְכׇל הַנִּדְחֶה מִפְּנֵי הַשָּׁעָה - שָׁעָה נִדְחֵת מִפָּנָיו

One who presses on time, time presses back. 

One who yields before time, time yields before them.

        All of these metaphors - time as a person, or a path, or a commodity - capture something significant. But they also misrepresent some element of our experience of time, because time is - first and foremost - not tangible. We cannot hold it in our hands, or walk on it, or speak to it. And that is part of what makes time so significant to us as Jews. 

        Time, to us, is sacred. We are all here in this room because of the sacred nature of time: the rhythm of the week and Shabbat, or the year for those of us anticipating Elul, or the lifetime for those celebrating a Bar Mitzvah or an aufruf, or commemorating a yahrzeit. These are the most important elements of our tradition. 

        Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel suggests sacred time is what saved us as a people. We used to have the Temple, this sacred, central meeting-place, but the nature of the physical is temporary and it was destroyed. We had the Promised Land, which the Israelites in our parashah are waiting to enter into, and then we became dispersed. Without that centrality, without one place everyone could come to for the pilgrimage festivals, what would become of the Jewish people? 

        Heschel suggests, quite brilliantly, that the concept of sacred time is stronger than that of sacred space. We might not always have a physical structure to return to, but time cannot be torn down or taken away. Heschel writes: 

    “The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals; and our Holy of Holies is a shrine that neither the Romans nor the Germans were able to burn; a shrine that even apostasy cannot easily obliterate: the Day of Atonement.”

Or, as Ahad HaAm so eloquently said: “More than the Jews have kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the Jews.”

        Time is the most significant and sacred thing we have because it is intangible. It will always be there for us; it cannot be destroyed by those who might tear down altars. But it is also so difficult to contain and understand and contemplate, so we craft metaphors. Time is a path; a person; a commodity. 

        I have a problem with time as a path. We know that we are speaking in metaphor when time is personified. We know that commodifying time about how we place value. But the pathway is deeply misleading. It paints the picture of us walking forwards into the future, with the past behind us. We use that language all the time - the future is forwards and the past is backwards. New opportunities are in front of us; past experiences are behind us. 

        I just think it doesn’t work. We are not facing the future. If we were, we could see it. What we can see is the past; the future is mysterious. We can only be going forwards into time if our eyes are in the backs of our heads! We seem instead to be walking backwards on this road, facing the past - the thing known to us, experienced by us - and walking backwards into the future, unsure of where our feet will land at every step.

        I am not the only person bothered by this, though I had to cast quite a wide net to find something. The Aymara people, indigenous to South America, gesture behind themselves to refer to the future. And there is a Maori saying that references “walking backwards into the future”. 

        Our metaphors might not touch this idea quite the same way, but the development of our languages reveals something of the struggle. English has cobbled together a future tense out of spare parts, in a process sometimes referred to as “grammaticalisation”. There’s no inflection in English for the future. We speak or play in present and we spoke or played in past, but the future tense requires a bit of lexical lighthandedness. English lifted verbs such as “going to” and “will” to use in the future, as if it wasn’t obvious that we needed it. English formed a future tense on the fly. The reason is a matter of much debate, but some scholars suggest that it is about certainty and uncertainty. We know the past enough to point to it and discuss it. The future, however, is mysterious. 

Many languages, including many European languages but also several Asian languages, reflect this by having messier forms to refer to the uncertain future. 

        Biblical Hebrew has a similar tension in tense-making. Though Modern Hebrew will claim a past and a future, the biblical tenses are more certain and uncertain. The perfect tense is certain, and therefore used primarily for the past. The imperfect tense is uncertain, and therefore used for the future. Except when it isn’t. Prophetic prediction sometimes is considered fixed - these events will certainly occur. Prophecy is therefore sometimes given in the perfect tense - referred to as the “prophetic perfect” - meaning that it looks like the past tense, except it’s referring to the future. And therefore thoroughly confusing translators and readers everywhere. 

        Languages develop by usage. Time cannot be held and pointed to and understood. And so the way we communicate reflects our messy experience of time, whether by mixed metaphor or grammatical development.

        Speaking of prophets - by the way. That image of walking backwards, not knowing where our feet are going to land because we can only see the past? The prophets in that kind of metaphor are the ones who can see where we are going - what we are about to walk into. Even after the time of prophecy, a time in which we are all looking in the wrong direction, we should still aim to hear those voices warning us that the next step may be over the edge. 

        On the one hand, time is intangible, tangled, and messy. And on the other, it is the most sacred aspect of Jewish experience. 

        The point of the Month of Elul is to use what we can see - our past - to make better decisions about our lives. We are asked to spend this coming month doing Cheshbon haNefesh, spiritual accounting. Accounting is a good word for it - because we have to be accountable for our mistakes. We are asked to take note of the places we’ve previously misstepped. To apologise to those we’ve hurt. To make up for our mistakes. 

        We are urged to do this at least in part because our past decisions will affect that insecure future. We call “repentance” “teshuvah”, returning. Perhaps because it allows us to plot our path blindly after all, by returning to the direction we should be going. 

        Teshuvah is, I think, the only power we have over time. We cannot look over our shoulders to check where we’re going, but the past forms our direction. We can place ourselves a little better by looking at the way we came. We can predict some elements of the direction we’re going in by the direction we came. We can avoid hitting the same pitfalls and obstacles, shift and adjust through contemplation and work. 

        When we arrive at Rosh Hashanah, we will be asked over and over again to confront our mortality, to think seriously about who we are and how we will be judged, and to heal our relationships with God. This month we are entering, the month leading up to that, is a gift. Before we get to the Day of Atonement, and the image of the Divine ready to sign our names into the book– 

        Before we get there, we’re reminded that we still have an opportunity to put right our relationships with those around us. We still have an opportunity for teshuvah, for re-setting ourselves on our path. 

        I urge us all not to let it slip by us. Because the other truth of time is that none of us know how much is left.