Parshat Pinchas: It's about time...

I’d like to try an exercise for our imaginations, try to imagine a world without time, not a world without clocks or even sundials and calendars, just an eternal now, but a world without time as we know it altogether?  Past, present, and future are all equally present.

 

Can you imagine this world?  What would it look like?  Or feel like?

 

The world and us would, for sure, be entirely different than what’s familiar to us, a jumble of everything that ever was, is, or could be, no sequential thoughts, so no memories.

 

For everything and everyone to exist in the way the Torah, and science, describe them, time is necessary, and the first thing God creates is a difference between day and night, signifying the passage of time making one day.

 

Because time is fundamental to creation, time is the source of all our celebrations – we literally celebrate the fact God enables us to recognize and make chosen times holy.  

 

This week, we read from the end of Parshat Pinchas, all about the festivals – Passover, Shavuot, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot.

 

The Torah instructs us to celebrate nearly all festivals at the full moon, the middle of the Hebrew month.  

 

Clearly these festivals coincide with the climate and produce growing cycle of the year as well as our memories of significant events that occurred at these times of year.  

 

And so they follow both a linear progression of time, the progression of ancient events that happened in sequence, and they follow a circular progression of time, as we celebrate the same holidays at the same season with the turning of each year.

 

Time then opens up our hearts and souls to holiness, to community, to God’s hand in creating and renewing the world, but time also limits our physical existence.  We’re born, we grow older, we die.  

 

It’s a dilemma – without time, our existence would be so fundamentally different, little to nothing of what we know or love would exist in any familiar form.  But with time, we find the days may be long but the years are short, and time disappears faster than we can notice it.

 

Our tradition teaches us the response to this dilemma is to savor time, to mark significant moments with friends and family, with the smells of special foods, with prayers and reflections reminding us of our obligations, encouraging us to strive in every moment to dedicate ourselves to doing mitzvot, holy actions, that transform the ‘now’ into the a more holy and harmonious ‘now’ and set an example for others to do the same.

 

Maimonides teaches us about the days of the Messiah:

It should not occur to you that during the days of the Messiah a single thing from the “ways of the world”¹³⁵I.e. Nature.will be canceled nor will there be something novel in the Creation. Rather, the world will continue in its customary way.

 

The relationship between people will change, there will be new knowledge and insight, but the nature of the world will continue – there will still be time.  And so Maimonides teaches us an essential, compelling lesson about us, about our world, and about the world we hope to create.

 

If the time of the Messiah is a time the world functions as we’re used to it, then the Messianic world, the renewed and redeemed world, can exist in every next moment.  The next minute, the next day, can be the renewed and redeemed world, and we can shape what that world will look like – correction, we are, even right now, shaping what that world will look like.

 

Let’s get to work, there’s no time to waste!