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Bryan Schwartz
Law Professor, Author of "Sacred Goof" and "Consoulation: A Musical Mediation"

Jewish Integrated Time

There are many time zones in the world: Eastern Standard Time, Central Standard Time, and Greenwich Mean Time. This week’s Torah reading, Bo, displays the essential Jewish concept of time. Let’s call it JIT, Jewish Integrated Time.

God tells Moses that the plagues will continue. We are at a specific, concrete moment in human history, an earlier “now,” in which an Eternal presence intervenes. An action will take place in the immediate future: “It will show your sons and your son’s sons how I made a mockery of the Egyptians.”

The objective, however, extends into an indefinite future of adherence to God’s commandments and of historical remembrance of the Exodus.

God is already telling Moses that the Exodus must be remembered annually by the Jewish people. “This day shall be to you one of remembrance; you shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord throughout the ages; you shall celebrate it as an institute for all time.”

The Jewish calendar is cyclical, but it can celebrate events that amount to an irrevocable change, including human enlightenment and progress that cannot be undone. At the end of Bo, Pharaoh says to Moses, “If you see me again, you will die.”  Moses replies, “I shall not see  you again.” The Exodus tells of a human encounter with the infinite and eternal that must be forever remembered – and forever consequential. There is no going back to accepting an order in which a Pharaoh, or any earthing person or thing, is divine or the supreme arbiter of right and wrong.

God had foreseen the Captivity in Egypt and the Redemption. He tells Abraham the outline was perhaps a plan to educate and test the Israelites. They would learn about tyranny, oppression, and the experience of being a stranger in a strange land, to live in a country obsessed with life after death rather than life itself. The experience would teach them the value of freedom and compassion. The test was whether they would rise as partners in their liberation, whether they would accept a divine law rooted in ethics and liberty, and whether they would ultimately acquire the self-belief to battle their way back into possession of their promised land.

The literary narrative places the event in the context of the past, present, and future; “never before had there been so many locusts, nor will there ever be so many again.”

In the Jewish literary world, we travel freely among texts from different moments and places; a word in Exodus may be illuminated in a later saying of a prophet, a psalm, a Mishna, a Talmud discussion…or a se\on in a little Diaspora synagogue today. Biblical Hebrew is a language that does not have a distinct set of past, present, and future tenses. What better medium to convey the Jewish sense of time?

This year, perhaps three thousand years later, we are approaching the Passover seder. We will recite that everyone shall remember the beginning of the Exodus “as though they were there.”

To be a traditionalist Jew is not to “live in the moment.” Some self-help books propose that focusing on the moment is a pathway to peace; try not to dwell on the past or worry about the future. The Jewish tradition is that every moment is embedded in a great sweep of history  – infused by transcendental meaning as well as historical remembrance … and of looking forward to some culmination of human history, an ultimate redemption, the messianic age, where we shall finally have fulfillment, as a people in harmony with all of humanity and the created order. During the Seder, there is a cup of Elijah, who lived in the past, who dwells now in heaven, who will some day return to usher in the age of peace.

Presiding over this arc of history is a supreme Creator who is outside of history.   God creates day and night, light and dark, the passage and ordering of worldly time.  At the burning bush God reveals that the ancestral God of the Hebrews is the God that transcends the material world – a power that was, is, and will be. The God of history is the God of physics. He is the God of an Ineffable and Infinite Power transcending history and physics.

Here is how I put it  in my little book, It’s About Time: 104 Dimensions of Time at Passover (which you can download for free at https://www.sacredgoof.ca/the-passover-seder/):

But what if we at the Seder think about it as taking place in JIT, Jewish Integrated Time?  It is a time zone where our ancestors dwelt, where we live, where future generations will live, where – we believe or we can wistfully imagine – we are warmed by a transcendent spirit whose name- revealed to Moses at the burning bush – evokes the fusion of the past, present and future on Earth and in a dimension beyond it?

The opening invocation of the Seder – to the lonely, to the isolated – can be understood as a welcoming a communal event in the here-and-now which remembers and celebrates the past, present and future of an entire people – and more than that, a people who have been, are now and always will be challenged to connect with a universal presence beyond time.”

About the Author
Bryan Schwartz is a playwright, poet, songwriter and author drawing on Jewish themes, liturgy and more. In addition to recently publishing the 2nd edition of Holocaust survivor Philip Weiss' memoirs and writings titled "Reflections and Essays," Bryan's personal works include two Jewish musicals "Consolation: A Musical Meditation" (2018) and newly debuted "Sacred Goof" (2023). Bryan also created and helps deliver an annual summer program at Hebrew University in Israeli Law and Society and has served as a visiting Professor at both Hebrew University and Reichman University.  Bryan P Schwartz holds a bachelor’s degree in law from Queen’s University, Ontario, and Master’s and Doctorate Degree in Law from Yale Law School. As an academic, he has over forty years of experience, including being the inaugural holder of an endowed chair in international business and trade law,  and has won awards for teaching, research and scholarship. He has been a member of the Faculty of Law at the University of Manitoba since 1981. Bryan serves as counsel for the Pitblado Law firm since 1994. Bryan is an author/contributor of 34 books and has over 300 publications in all. He is the founding and general editor of both the Asper Review of International Business and Trade Law and the Underneath the Golden Boy series, an annual review of legislative developments in Manitoba. Bryan also has extensive practical experience in advising governments – federal,  provincial, territorial and Indigenous –and private clients  in policy development and legislative reform and drafting. Areas in which Bryan has taught, practiced or written extensively, include: constitutional law, international, commercial, labour, trade,  internet and e-commerce law  and alternate dispute resolution and governance. For more information about Bryan’s legal and academic work, please visit: https://bryan-schwartz.com/.
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