The Jewish Power Blog: Power over Time
A recurring theme in our thoughts and our prayers over the High Holy Days is expressed beautifully in the Unetaneh Tokef prayer: “[We are like] a broken shard, withering grass, a fading flower, a passing shadow, a dissipating cloud, a breath of wind, scattering dust, a fleeting dream.” Which is perhaps just a poetic expansion of Psalm 90:10: “In an instant, we fly away.” Shakespeare thought about it too:
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. (Macbeth 5:5)
He explained the emotion behind the images:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
That is, time proceeds inexorably forward, unstoppable, irreversible – but we don’t. Thinking about that tomorrow creeping toward us day by day, when we will have flown away, makes us worry about what will be left of us after that flight: our impact, our legacy; will our memory be a blessing? And it makes us afraid of the great unknown of the future; not just what will be a generation hence, but what will be tomorrow, or a few minutes from now. For though we can know a great deal about the past, we can know nothing about the future: the vastness of the unknown that stretches onward forever from this instant can be overwhelming. Based on past experience (ours and others’) we can try to insure our future: saving, planning, wearing a seat belt, eating right, doing good… but the bottom line is that “nobody knows anything.”
Most of the time, we put this dread out of mind by the powerful mechanism of rhythm:
Only that shall happen which has happened; Only that occur which has occurred; There is nothing new under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:9)
The future may be out of our control, but we can gain some comfort from the apparent cyclical nature of time: the laws of physics are such that electrons revolve around nuclei, planets around suns, and these give the impression of repetition: Rosh Hashana keeps on coming back, just like the sunset and the moonrise. Joni Mitchell also thought about this:
And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game.
According to a legend in the Talmud (Avoda Zara 8a), when Adam noticed the days getting shorter he panicked, believing that the world was ending on account of his sin; so he fasted and prayed and, as it happened, the winter solstice passed and the light began to increase. So he learned that sometimes what seems inexorable is just a limited view of a larger cycle. And when God actually did [almost] end the world, God comforted Noah afterwards with this promise: “Seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night – shall not cease.” (Gen. 8:22). For us, awareness of those cycles and our ritual celebration of them – day, week, month, year – give us the perhaps life-saving illusion that time is under control – we know what is coming next at any moment. We know what to expect, and that is a great comfort. Or at least we think we know.
Not just in the calendar, but everywhere, we look for evidence of cycles that can take the sting out of time. For example, music: what is rhythm but the assumption that the interval between two beats we just heard will repeat itself again… and again, giving form to sound and giving us the feeling of control over time? When listening to music, we [almost] always know what to expect at any given instant; the beat goes on.
The composer John Cage (1912-1992), who pioneered “indeterminacy” in music, argued that “This is why… it is so difficult to listen to music we are familiar with: memory has acted to keep us aware of what will happen next, and so it is almost impossible to remain alive in the presence of a well-known masterpiece.” (Silence, 1961, p. 136) To which most of us would respond: “That’s exactly why we listen to music we know: it is very empowering to feel that we know exactly what will happen next!” Music, like the calendar, serves as an antidote to the poison of despair we encounter when we allow ourselves to admit that we really don’t know what awaits us just a moment hence.
This tension between the inexorable march of time and our attempts to control it through rhythms is ever-present in our lives as individuals; it seems to be part of being human. However, when we transpose the remedy of rhythm onto the life of the nation, there can be unhappy consequences. A central innovation of Judaism was the belief in history: there are cycles of nature, but there is also a linear progression of events that does not repeat: from Abraham’s epiphany to the Red Sea to Sinai to Jerusalem, the nation experienced and continues to experience a series of unique events that formed it and established a relationship with God. We are not under the control of cycles – we are free to act, and our acts have consequences – and that sequence is history. Once we try to superimpose cycles on history we withdraw from responsibility and imagine we have become passive riders on the carousel of time.
Imagining that history is cyclical gives us the illusion of knowing what to expect. But Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) concluded:
Man cannot guess the events that occur under the sun. For man tries strenuously, but fails to guess them; and even if a sage should think to discover them, he would not be able to… (8:17) The end of the matter, when all is said and done: Revere God and observe His commandments.” (12:13)
We cannot let our behavior as a nation be influenced by unprovable suppositions about the messianic time line. All we can do is “to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly…” (Micah 6:8)
