Rabbi Marc's Rosh HaShanah Sermon
About Time - 1st Day Rosh HaShanah 5783
I spent a lot of time this summer by a beautiful, tidal river, a magical place of my childhood where I learned to sail; Burnham-on-Crouch in Essex on the east coast of England. As well as a habitat for gulls, gannets, cormorants and kittiwakes, seals, crabs and other salt water creatures, the River Crouch hosts many boats of all shapes and sizes that bob up and down on their buoys, changing their orientation up river then down river as the tide swings them around on their moorings. The river punctuates time with its tidal rhythm; high water, low water, six hour cycles, flowing and ebbing, expanding and contracting, holding and pausing. There is something profound and wonderful about watching these rising and falling tides as a way of observing time.
The seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years pass faster than we care to admit, and as we begin a New Year on the Jewish calendar, I have been reflecting so much about time in all its complexity, mystery and confusion. We have just ended not only another Jewish year, but a shmitta year, the seventh, sabbatical year in the cycle; a year in which we let the land rest and we reflect on our relationship to the earth, to work, to play and to time itself. What does it mean to leave one year behind and start another? How do we mark time? Celebrate time? Honor time? We are caught in an illusion that we control time, but really it mostly controls us.
Wasting time
Spending time
Saving time
Gaining time
Losing time
Taking time
Giving time
Making time
Carving out time
Passing time
Killing time
Cutting time
Winning time
Filling time
Buying time
Counting time
Burning time
These are just some of the verbs that we use to describe our relationship with time. Yes, we feel a sense of urgency in our lives with so much to do and the pressing need to be efficient, productive, useful with the time that we have, yet that can be a trap as we make ourselves so busy. Personally I regret the frequency of saying “I would love to do that, but I am busy. I don’t have time.” Knowing that it is not about having the time, but making the time and that hours and hours can pass without me really knowing what I have done.
I recently read the book published last year, Four Thousand Weeks - Time Management for Mortals by the British author now living in New York, Oliver Burkeman. It is both an alarming and deeply comforting read, putting a lot in perspective and powerfully challenging some of the traditional concepts of time management. The title comes from the shocking reality that an average human lifespan is 4,000 weeks - that’s it. If you are lucky and live until 90, you get almost 4,700 weeks. The Queen, whose recent passing moved me more than I imagined, lived for just under 5,000 weeks. Ultimately this book is a deep invitation to accept and embrace our finitude and let go of the conceit that we are limitless in what we can achieve and how we can impact and save the world. None of us was born into the Royal Family and very few of us are going to have an earth shattering impact on history. Although some hasidic sources urge us to remember that we are all descendents of King David, so we are royalty! We all inhabit our finite spheres with our unique slice of time and space and influence. I, like so many of you, experience such anxiety about how I am using my time and what I am achieving. Oliver Burkeman says:
"When you’re faced with too many demands, it’s easy to assume that the only answer must be to make better use of time, by becoming more efficient, driving yourself harder, or working for longer….Soon your sense of self-worth gets completely bound up with how you’re using time; it stops being merely the water in which you swim and turns into something you feel you need to dominate or control, if you’re to avoid feeling guilty, panicked or overwhelmed." P.24-25
And a bit later, he says...
"But ultimately it backfires. It wrenches us out of the present, leading to a life spent leaning into the future, worrying about whether things will work out, experiencing everything in terms of some later, hoped-for benefit, so that peace of mind never quite arrives….The trouble with attempting to master your time, it turns out, is that time ends up mastering you." P.26
It is not an original religious or spiritual idea to embrace what is and live in the moment “The Power of Now” as Eckhart Tolle would have it, but there is something about relinquishing ourselves of the notion that we have infinite, limitless possibilities, that is important. As Burkeman puts it, “Rather than face our limitations, we engage in avoidance strategies, in an effort to carry on feeling limitless….p. 30” In another passage, he says; "It’s only by facing our finitude that we can step into a truly authentic relationship with life." P. 62
We recently experienced the sad and sudden loss of Bill Nagel, husband of Joanie, at 72 years old. In the eulogy for this remarkable, kind man, I quoted Abraham Lincoln who said: “And in the end it is not the years in your life that count, it’s the life in your years.” There is a verse in Psalms (90:12) limnot yameinu cayn hodah v’navi l’vav hochmah - teach us to count our days rightly so that we may obtain a wise heart. These two quotes from Abe Lincoln and the psalmist point towards making our days count, rather than counting our days.
Of course we have to think of the future and the impact our choices in the present are having on the future, with the most obvious example being our carbon footprint with the increasing manifestations of our changing climate in devastating extreme weather events. Professor William MacAskill of Oxford University calls this longtermism, making choices with awareness of their impact on future generations, which is crucial, like The Seventh Generation Principle based on an ancient Iroquois philosophy that the decisions we make today should result in a sustainable world seven generations into the future. It's more than a brand of toilet paper and laundry detergent! There are so many people in this community working so deeply and tirelessly for our future, whether our Green Team headed by Farmer Becca, or our new building committee headed by Bruce Wildman and Jeff Gan Levy, all giving so much thought, energy and, yes, time to these projects. However, if we live constantly in regret for the past and anxiety at the uncertainty of the future, we are not living in the present.
Untapped, this sense of urgency many of us feel can make us rush our way through life, too busy to be aware, distracted and multi-tasking and incredibly impatient and even intolerant. Our addiction to our devices, of course, doesn't help with this. My dog, Baruch, however, helps keep me in the here and now when I am in a hurry, as he sniffs,and tastes and chases every rabbit and squirrel in the present. In the Torah passage from Deuteronomy chapter 11 that became the 2nd paragraph of the shema, amidst the complex theology of cause and effect and the power of consequences, there is a verse that says v’avadatem meheira, part of a warning that literally translated means “you will be quickly destroyed.” Our teacher Reb Zalman wrote an English prayer book called Sh'ma': A Concise Weekday Siddur For Praying, and he translates this phrase brilliantly and audaciously as “your rushing will destroy you.” In our terror of embracing what is, we hastily and clumsily stampede our way through life causing devastation. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who was knighted by the Queen in 2005 who possibly actually said “why is this knight different to all other knights”, wrote:
"Never be in too much of a rush to stop and come to the aid of someone in need of help. Rarely if ever will you better invest your time. It may take a moment, but its effect may last a lifetime." (Parshat Ki Tetzeh)
In Oliver Burkeman’s words:
"The more you hurry, the more frustrating it is to encounter tasks (or toddlers) that won’t be hurried; the more compulsively you plan for the future, the more anxious you feel about any remaining uncertainties, of which there will always be plenty. And the more individual sovereignty you achieve over your time, the lonelier you get." P.31
And...
"Working too hastily means you’ll make more errors, which you’ll then be obliged to go back to correct; hurrying a toddler to get dressed, in order to leave the house, is all but guaranteed to make the process last much longer." P.163
Tolstoy, in War and Peace, said "The two most powerful warriors are patience and time." Our culture has demanded instant gratification, immediate results and a brutal lack of patience that often manifests in very careless and unkind treatment of others. It has been calculated, apparently, that if Amazon’s front page loaded one second more slowly, the company would lose $1.6 billion in annual sales. (P.165) Unbelievable isn’t it? Or is it?
There was a recent interview with NPR's Scott Simon talking with Alexandra Reeve Givens, president of the Center for Democracy & Technology, about employers monitoring their employees and using technology to check exactly how employees are using their time. The interviewee said “I remember reading one story about a company that marketed this suite of strategies to basically generate a timecard every 10 minutes. It would capture what the employee was doing at exactly that point. And one of their workers gave an interview saying that he had to time his bathroom breaks..” This is an absurd and disturbing example of how far we have gone in the attempt to reach efficiency and productivity. It is very sinister to think of rather than us watching the clock, the clock is watching us.
The twentieth century Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai wrote a poem that challenges the classic text from Kohelet (Ecclesiastes), made famous by the Byrds song Turn,Turn, Turn . The passage, that we will read during Sukkot, begins “l’col z’man v’eit, l’chol chayfetz tachat hashamayim - to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven -
A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep.
Amichai’s poem called Adam b’Chayav - A Man in His Life, begins:
Adam b’chayav ein lo z’man sh’yihyeh lo z’man l’col. A man doesn't have time in his life to have time for everything.
The poem continues:
A person doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose.
Ecclesiastes was wrong about that.
A person needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history takes years and years to do.
A person doesn't have time.
When they lose they seek,
when they find they forget,
when they forget they love,
when they love they begin to forget.
The poem concludes:
They die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of themself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.
I love the idea, and I think many of us experience the truth of this, that love, hate, laughing and crying happen in the same moment with the same eyes and mouths. The original biblical text certainly is an acknowledgement of mortality and finitude, but Yehuda Amichai, born in Germany and a fighter in Israel’s wars and a witness to the pain and joy of the Jewish state, poignantly brings the perspective that we do not have the luxury to compartmentalize time. Living in present time is to embrace what is with fortitude and patience.
I am also fascinated and intrigued by the idea that this time continuum might not be the only one and that, perhaps, there are different versions of me living different lives in different universes. This Multiverse concept has captured our imagination with Dr. Strange in The Multiverse of Madness, and Evelyn Wang, the discontented Chinese American woman, who moves from lives in different universes in the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once. Kabbalah and other mystical ideas entertain the notion of different worlds and different realities, and perhaps some of us do move in and out of lives lived and unlived in other dimensions, but I think this is a distraction from the central idea of the finitude of our lives and our time. I just wanted an excuse to mention those two cool movies. On one hand though, in those inevitable moments when we feel unfulfilled in our life's potential and the wasting of time, we can be comforted by the abstract possibility that we are living full and happy lives in other realms. The recurring question to Dr. Steven Strange across the multiverse is “are you happy? It can be equally comforting, however, to accept that we are mortal, limited, finite beings; that we are doing our best in our imperfect and flawed way and that we are not superheroes tasked with the impossible mission of saving the world. To quote Oliver Burkeman again:
You breathe a sigh of relief, and as you dive into life as it really is, in clear-eyed awareness of your limitations, you begin to acquire what has become the least fashionable but perhaps most consequential of superpowers: patience. P.171
And the beautiful and harsh truth that in the ultimate arc of history, the universe doesn’t really care how we use or don’t use our time, as we are kind of irrelevant and insignificant. Burkeman has coined a fantastic phrase; ‘cosmic insignificance therapy!’ He says:
Cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things. To embrace it, to whatever extent you can…dropping back from Godlike fantasies of cosmic significance into the experience of life as it concretely, finitely – and often enough marvelously – really is. P.213
So, like the classic Jewish story attributed to the Polish Hassidic rabbi, Simcha Bunem, that every coat should have two pockets with a note in each, one of which says: ‘bishvilli nivra haolam - for my sake the Universe was created” and in the other “Ani afar v’efer - I am dust and ashes,'' hence we can be a time traveling superhero in the multiverse or we can embrace our insignificance. Both can be useful, but I am compelled by the latter and the relief it brings to the relentless pressure of achieving my goals.
Time, time, time. We can make time sacred too. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously observes in his beautiful, poetic book, The Sabbath, that the root of kadosh, holy or sacred, is used in the Torah for the first time, not in reference to a place or a person, but to a time, a day, Shabbat. We mark this every week, the new moons every month and the incredible cycle of holidays we have on our Jewish calendar with the notion that we do not control time, but we let it, in its cycles like the tides, control us and invite us into a special rhythm of celebration, commemoration, joy, feasting and presence. The Catholic mystic Richard Rohr talks of living in “deep time” and Burkeman refers to the philosopher Kieran Setiya’s notion of atelic time, which is activity whose meaning and value isn’t derived from its telos, or ultimate aim, but the only reason to do them is for themselves alone, there is no more to going for a walk than what you are doing right now. Not the future goal of summiting another 14er, but being present on the hike for its own sake or lishma as we might say in Hebrew. In Jewish tradition the optimum mode of studying Torah is lishma, for its own sake and many of the mitzvot, including hearing the shofar and gazing into the Hanukkah candles are for their own sake too. We easily dismiss anything that does not have an ultimate goal or objective as “a waste of time” in a world where there is too much to do, but as John Lennon said; “Time you enjoy wasted was not time wasted.” Reb Zalman makes a distinction between ‘commodity time’ and ‘organic time,’ which he defines as sacred and living more in tune with your deeper needs, rather than the demands of efficiency and the taskmaster time. Daily prayer, meditation or other spiritual practices could be seen as a waste of time. I don’t have time for that. My life is too busy. We can get caught in thinking that prayer is about the outcome, the answer, the goal and object of our prayer request, but prayer is really lishma, atelic, for its own sake; daily and weekly moments of connecting to organic time. Kabbalists see Shabbat as a time beyond time, entering into the eternal, Divine, transcendent time. A kind of multiverse! We can dismiss these as a waste of our precious time or these experiences and practices may actually be what save us. “The bare branches pointing to the place where there's time for everything” is the haunting last line of Yehuda Amichai’s poem and is talking about death, but it could also be the realm of organic, deep, timeless time.
This is not abboragting our responsibilities, nor denying the importance and urgency of what needs to be done. And there is so much! I often think of the sweet Sol Kimmerling who died a few months ago in this neighborhood, who in the last week of his life was singing Hillel’s teaching from Pirkei Avot, “v’im lo achshav, eimatai, v’im lo achshav eimatai - if not now, when.” “If not now” can be seen as a call for immediate action, but the paradox is that our obsession with productivity and getting it all done now can be counterproductive and we might actually need to slow down rather than speed up in that attempt to embrace our finitude and to be fully in this moment; to see time as something to share rather to hoard, to celebrate these holy and sacred times with family and community and to let go of the grandiosity that the world cannot exist without me. Jorge Luis Borges writes:
Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.
I am the river. I am the tiger. I am the fire.
Let’s begin this new year by reevaluating how we see and how we live in time; living more mindfully, more kindly, more gently, slowing down when we need to slow down and speeding up when we need to speed up, making the days count, rather than counting the days, and letting go of the illusion that I am in control of this mystery of time. The tide will rise and the tide will fall; it will be slack and it will be racing and strong.
