Our Rabbi's Message
April 10th 2009
By Rabbi Aaron KriegelHow does one begin the year? Is the year a cosmological event, or does it describe the condition of people? There is no really good answer to that question, but people do not really understand what the question is.
In the world in which we find ourselves the age of the universe is in the billions of years, far more than any of us can count. Our whole existence and the existence of our people and of humanity is but a grain of sand on the shore that we call time. There is no reason for us to be a beginning or an end in the process of the universe. There is little reason for us to even think that what we do in the few short days that we live on this earth leaves any impression on the cosmology of existence itself.
The year is an unnatural idea that would seem to be created by humankind, so that we could keep an order to the infinitesimal acts we do on a daily basis on the speck that we call the earth. Yet, our forefathers did not see the world in that light. They thought that heaven and earth were but thousands of years old. They recognized that they lived in between a set beginning and a set end. They wanted to describe all that happened between that beginning and that end and so they created the idea that days are parts of weeks and weeks are parts of months and months are parts of years and so on. In that manageable universe they held that God gave us those time markers. From one of those markers we were commanded to count the cycles of time.
We, however, had another idea. We looked at time from the human point of view. We saw that life generates meaning when people are free to pursue life. As a consequence we did not feel comfortable holding that our lives as slaves had any meaning because we were doing another person's work. We were just primitive machines. As a consequence we began to count days and years when we were redeemed from Egypt, when we were free.
In the Ten Commandments we learn about time in reference to Shabbat. In one rendition time is based on Cosmology, God's standard. In the other rendition time begins with the Exodus, our human standard. The former standard de-emphasizes infinite time; the latter de-emphasizes the historical role of man.
Which is right? The choice is yours.
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