All in Good Time

 In Jewish Integrated Time, every moment derives its meaning from the past, is intrinsically important, and is connected with the future, the nature of which will depend largely on the choices we make today. The whole arc of history involves periods of spiritual lapse and national defeat, periods of redemption, but is ultimately – we imagine or hope or trust – will culminate in a messianic age in which the whole world is full of life, justice, and harmony. Outside of time, there is a transcendent God who does not dwell in time but rather created it.

Part of Jewish Integrated Time is the back-and-forth flow of its literary productions. A passage of the Torah may only be intelligible, or only have a profound emotional or intellectual impact, in light of an earlier passage in the story. Every time a character uses the simple word hineni, “here I am”, there is an echo of earlier episodes where a character – Abraham, Moses, Samuel the prophet – makes the statement upon assuming responsibility and accountability for a holy mission (Genesis 22:1; Exodus 3:4; 1 Samuel 3:4). We even begin to hear the absence of the word. We read Jonah the prophet around this time of year; when he is called upon to preach doom to the wicked city of Ninevah, his response is not “here I am” (Jonah 1:3). We hear his silence loud and clear. Effectively, he says “let me out of here”. He runs away, descends into the depths of the sea, and only after he is swallowed by the fish and expelled back onto his land does he assume the mantle of prophethood.

In Deuteronomy 30:11-14, a passage in this week’s Torah reading Nitzavim, God tells the people that the Instructions are not up in the heavens or far across the sea; “no, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it”.

You can never see this ancient biblical passage in the same light after reading a surpassingly brilliant and consequential  interpretation of it in  the Talmud, about the oven of Akhnai (Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 59b). It is the passage of the Talmud that is on display in these times at a  museum display at the High Court of Israel. The Talmudic account is wondrously concise, in some ways funny, in some ways tragic, and worthy of endless study.

What happens is that there is a dispute over how to interpret the instructions. Rabbi Eliezer takes a particular position; the majority disagree. Rabbi Eliezer asks a carob tree to move if it agrees with him. It does. He asks a river to reverse its flow if it agrees with him. It does. By the end, he asks a voice from Heaven to agree with him. It does. But the other rabbis quote Deuteronomy: the Instructions are not in heaven, they are in our hearts. In effect, they say that we cannot change the language of the instructions, but we have the power to interpret. God responds by laughing and saying, “My children have defeated me.” You cannot change the words of the Torah, but we, as Jewish people, have the power to interpret them, and we can keep doing that through time.

So, the Torah is a partnership: God and his people, the letter of the law and its interpretation.

Even if God does not speak through voices from heaven, the words of his revelation remain alive in the spirits and minds of the people of Israel. God laughs that his children have “defeated him”. But God is laughing. His people – the stiff-necked people, the audacious people, the iconoclastic people – have found a way to both abide by God’s words with reverence and at the same time bring to bear all their resources of intellectual maturity, experience as individuals and as a people, practical judgment, and aspiration to holiness.

In the story of Joseph in Genesis, we witness an astonishing deployment of the power of interpretation. Joseph – the interpreter of dreams – is called upon to interpret his own life arc – the betrayal by his brothers, the humiliation of being sold into slavery, the degradation of being cast into prison for a crime he never committed.

Joseph places an interpretation on the original wrong that helps the brothers come to terms with the past. Joseph says this: if you had not sold me into slavery, if I had not been carried into Egypt, I would not now be able to save our people (Genesis 45:5-8; 50:20).

The point of redemptive interpretation is not to excuse the original wrong. It is not to minimize the harm. But here is what we might say: “After that evil, I was able to make it part of a larger story that involved redemption and reconciliation.”

Joseph’s redemptive interpretation does not detract from the reality of his suffering or the wrongness of his brothers’ betrayal. But it weaves the hurt and disgrace into a larger story in which those early chapters are part of an arc that is ultimately an inspiration to anyone seeking to move forward and upward from a terrible hurt.

Joseph rose to power based on his ability to predict the future. He achieved his ultimate greatness by using his humanity, wisdom, and faith to reinterpret the past. His life was an epitome of Jewish integrated time; in his past, he anticipated the future; in the future, he would render a magnificent new meaning to the past; he lived his life as part of a covenantal chain that started before him and would continue after him, largely due to his own partnership with the Eternal.

Around the time of Rosh Hashanah, we seek to remember past wrongs – to ourselves, by ourselves. We look ahead to how we can thrive better ourselves and do better for others. The past and present and the now converge as we cast our eyes upward to the Eternal intelligence that created time and initiated human history. That intelligence abides beyond the temporary. In His vision, that encompasses what was, is and will be, all of our suffering, aspiration, failures, and achievements have an ultimate and enduring meaning.