KI TISA: A Matter of Time

The Depressing Regression


The DSM-IV criteria for depression include the following: 

"Depressed mood all day, everyday,"  "diminished interest," "decreased appetite and libido," "indecisiveness..."  

It could be suggested that all of these symptoms emerge from an underlying perception that life is going nowhere...constantly.  Indeed, if a person were to look around, and come to a realization that he is just watching the same script being played over and over again, and he is powerless to change it, he will inevitably descend into a down.  Moreover, the down will deepen according to the depth of his perception that he cannot get off the merry-go-round that is his life.  


If encouraged to participate in an activity, he will tend to respond: What's the point?


We as healthy and happy people should answer this question for ourselves lest we come to ask it from a place of despair.  What is the point?  Where is everything headed?  And where am I headed in the midst of everything?   


The sun rises.  The sun sets.  The sun rises.  The sun sets.  The alarm goes off, hit snooze, goes off again, wake-up, go to work, eat lunch -- same soup & sandwich combo from two days ago, back to work, commute home. You turn on the TV, and there it is: the Shawshank Redemption running for the 5th time this week, on the next channel is a re-run of a Friends episode you've seen too many times to count.  You could swear that you've lived this day before, as the patterns repeat themselves like the infinite reflections between mirrors.  The same plot with the occasional change of set, costumes, props, and extras.


A clever child might tap into this to push off his homework: "Why do I have to do these math exercises?" he will ask.  "So I can get into the AP math class? So I can get into a good college?  So I can get a good internship, and then a good first job, so I can get a good recommendation for a good grad school, so I can get an even better job, so I can support a family and pay for the math education of my child so he can do his homework???  Forget it!  This vicious cycle stops here!"  


...The kid's got a good point! 


In fact, a quick survey of ancient civilizations will reveal that the vast majority of them (if not all of them), conceived of time itself as an eternal circular flow.  From the Indian peninsula through Mesopotamia and the Greek Pythagorians and Stoics, even on the other side of the Ocean, among Mayas, Aztecs, and Native North Americans, time was seen as an endless repeating cycle.

Ouroboros, the Greek alchemist symbol for eternal recurrence 

The recent resurgence of this vision of reality was spearheaded by the Existentialist philosophers, with Friedrich Nietszche at the helm:

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.' (The Gay Science, §341).

In addition, Albert Camus framed his famous essay The Myth of Sisyphus around the Greek mythical character, Sisyphus who in return for his attempt to override death, was doomed by the gods to eternally shlep a boulder up a mountain, at which point it would roll down to the bottom, and he'd have to go down and fetch it and start over.  On this, Camus writes:

"The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious" (Ch. 4). 

Camus establishes that the reality is that life is as absurd as Sisyphus' eternal punishment.  However, we are not necessarily doomed to depression because we can acknowledge the futility of life, laugh at its absurdity, and artificially "imagine" our own reasons for being happy.


As dismal as the existentialist vision is, it is arguably the most pervasive underlying worldview of our generation.  And all "imagining happiness" aside, we cannot leave the question unanswered: what is the point?


Time in Torah  


Can all these people be wrong?  


             Yes.


A quick look around the natural world will reveal that absolutely everything is apparently cyclical: the Water Cycle, the Carbon Cycle, the Kreb's Cycle, the Life Cycle of a Star, the Economic Cycle -- even in fashion, what was never imagined to be possible, happened -- the 80's came back into style.  


Almost everything that is measured by science is cyclical -- a closed system.  The whole modern movement to find the "Unifying Theory of Everything" is predicated on the assumption that we will be able to encapsulate all of the inner workings of the universe in a neat little package.  There is something very aesthetically compelling about this -- which may be what Nietsche calls "divine" -- a certain symmetry that we wish to discover, combined with a potent arrogance that we're capable of finding it.  It is therefore not so surprising that this is a prevalent view throughout world history.


We should not move on to the next point without mentioning that for 2,000 years, since Aristotle formalized it, the consensus in science, was precisely this: the world is eternal, without beginning and without end -- a closed system.  So powerful was this understanding that Albert Einstein himself upon seeing data that the galaxies were drifting apart from one another, implying that if you were to rewind the film, the universe had a beginning -- "fudged" the numbers to avoid that conclusion!  He later famously smacked his forehead when Edwin Hubble crunched the same numbers properly in 1929 and came to the unavoidable conclusion that the universe has a beginning, a previously "mythical" idea articulated by the Torah in the first word: בראשיח "In the beginning..."  

~~~~~

For weeks we've been reading about the building of the Mishkan, our Temple in the Desert.  Everyone got involved.  Everyone donated money, some people precious stones, others their personal jewelry.  There were those who decided they could be even more active: weaving, dyeing, embroidery, smelting, woodcutting -- you name it -- there was a lot of work that need to be done.  This was a huge project, and it sure beat lugging bricks over quicksand in Egypt.  More than that, Hashem Himself said that its completion was of the utmost importance, ultimately leading to the Shechina, the Divine Presence "dwelling amongst [us]" (Shmot 25:8).


Just as the instructions were concluded -- on the verge of the camp exploding into excitement at the opportunity to build this Mishkan "for G!d" so-to-speak, we received the following message from Hashem:

...אַךְ אֶת שַׁבְּתֹתַי תִּשְׁמֹרוּ כִּי אוֹת הִוא בֵּינִי וּבֵינֵיכֶם לְדֹרֹתֵיכֶם לָדַעַת כִּי אֲנִי ה' מְקַדִּשְׁכֶם      

...'שֵׁשֶׁת יָמִים יֵעָשֶׂה מְלָאכָה וּבַיּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי שַׁבַּת שַׁבָּתוֹן קֹדֶשׁ לה...

However, keep my Shabbats because it is a sign between Me and you 
for generations to know that I am Hashem the One who makes you kodesh
...for six days do work 
and the seventh is Shabbat Shabbaton for Hashem...(Shemot 31:13-15).

Shabbat trumps the Mishkan!  After all that build-up for the building of the Mishkan, and Shabbat rises paramount above it?!?  


There must be a many precious gems of wisdom buried within this nugget of Torah...

In terms of הלכה Halacha, this is actually the nerve center from which all the laws of Shabbat emanate.  Every physically creative process that was done to create the Mishkan must be prohibited on Shabbat, otherwise why wouldn't we work around the clock, 7-days-a-week for this momentous task we've been given?

But in terms of חכמת חיים Life Wisdom, consider the following:

Last week, we spoke about those concepts that fly so close to us that they evade our conscious radar.  "Time" is one of them.  Because, as we mentioned, the natural world and the existentialist underpinnings of our modern worldview scream that time is like a circular river that cyclically washes over us, we are unconsciously forced into looking at it this way.  But if we look carefully at the Hebrew word for "time" that was quietly waiting for us to pay attention to it, we see that the reality of time is very very different.

The Torah refers to time as זמן.  The root may look familiar: a הזמנה is an invitation to arrive at a certain place at a certain time, to be מזומן is to be ready for a particular goal...  The Torah sees time not as an aimless river, but rather pointing towards a definite nexus -- an endpoint.  As surely as the Torah said with certainty, against the winds of worldwide speculation that the universe had a beginning, it says that the arrow of history is pointing towards a place where all the plot-lines intersect.  

In addition, in the words of Rav Tzvi Hirsch Broide zt"l:

Time does not wash over man; Man travels through time.        

This implies that when the Jews were commanded to keep their first Shabbat in the desert, that stop in which the entire nation encamped together, was symbolically established for eternity as the space we return to every week called "Shabbat" (Michtav meEliyahu II 21).  Shabbat is the time of the week in which we are meant to actively step into the world of arrival, of reaching our goals, of celebrating the present, and of re-centering our sense of meaning.  And our whole week is oriented in preparation towards it.


Even though ostensibly one's life may look more-or-less the same from week to week, it is only because he's so stuck in the rat race of phone calls, e-mails, to-do lists, and meetings that he cannot just sit together with his family and perceive the inner dimension of life that is clouded by the maelstrom around it.  But, the person who keeps his eye on that inner world all week, on what his mission is, of course when he will sit back at the Shabbat table the following week, he will perceive, appreciate and celebrate his growth -- regardless of whether or not the cholent tastes the same -- life tastes different.  


Without a doubt, on any given Shabbat you haven't reached your ultimate life goals, and if you have, there are plenty of people around you who could use your help -- this is why Shabbat is called מעין עולם הבא "a microcosm of the world to come."  We are to relate to it as if we've arrived at our ultimate destination.  The Halacha even says that on Shabbat, one should not speak about things he needs to do during the week, and certainly not to prepare for the coming week.  Every Shabbat stands alone in that sense.  This is because it is so hard to drill into our hearts that life has an end goal.  But of course, through keeping Shabbat every week we are able to continually tap into where are we going and celebrate every step along the way.  When we dive back into the flow of traffic of the next week, we now have our eye on reaching that next Shabbat, and all the baby steps along the way to rejoice in our growth.    


The gemara in Shabbat 88b says that the Jewish people are compared to an Etrog tree -- just like the etrog tree sends forth its fruit before its leaves, so too do the Jewish people think first about the ultimate goal, and then worry about the technical details (see Maharal Tiferet Yisrael 29, Netiv haTemimut 2).  So often we get caught up in the world of technical details because we have not properly defined what is of essential and ultimate importance to us.  What will we want to have accomplished at 120 on our deathbeds?  Once we have defined this, then we can chart out how we can responsibly attain it with all the nuts and bolts involved.  Otherwise, we may find ourselves buried in nuts and bolts, without a clue at to what we're building.  


This is not just a religious/not-religious thing!  We see clearly that even the holy work of the Temple is suspended for Shabbat.  At any stage along the way, we can lose the forest for the trees if we do not continually search and focus on our goal through the fog.  


Simcha-Joy is the state of awareness that one is approaching the object of his desire (Vilna Gaon).  If Shabbat by Shabbat, we define our personal mission with more clarity, and week by week we work on assembling all the pieces of our Mishkan that point us towards that goal, then we are pointed towards a life high above a world running in circles.