Blog

I am sick of hearing about and responding to the virus, losing my words in my mask and standing here breathing my own air.

Before I begin to talk about beginnings, the head of the year, I want to give public thanks for private acts.  Albert and I have been helped in ways that stunned us almost to tears.  I want to praise and thank those people who have made our sequestration easy and even pleasant.  All of them are from this congregation.  We are an Am, a people.  You know who you are, and I don’t want to embarrass you.  You have made this congregation an Am, and you have proved it.  Thank you, thank you.

    When we lost the Jerusalem Temple, we Jews began the first of many diasporas, but the separation among the scholars and students was ameliorated by the letters they wrote to one another, many back and forth in the 400 years that spelled Rome’s own decline.  The scholar did more than grieve over the loss of that holy place.  Someone or some ones had the idea that instead of sanctifying location we might try to sanctify time.  

    I don’t know if this gifted, winged soul knew all the ramifications of this seemingly odd and certainly unique idea, that it strengthened monotheism, that is made us mobile in a way we never could have been without it, that it allowed for all the creative variations of real diversity in much more than skin color, that it shut the door on incarnation and widened the range of our vision, that it had power and endurance that location does not.
 

   I used to teach Etymology to a 6th grade class at Ralston School.  Kids read more then, and their vocabularies were bigger than they are now.  One of the things I did was to write a group of cognates of Latin and Greek words on the board and let the students figure out what the roots must have been and what they must have meant.  One day, the words were confine, refine, final, define, definite, and infinite.  The kids got to fine, finem, yes, limits, borders, boundaries.  I proceeded to open the definitions and when I came to infinite, I remarked that scientists say that space is infinite.  What would that mean?  Yes, no end, no limit.  Chris Green, front row, said, “That would mean…that would mean no end.”  “Precisely.”  “That it would never…never…”  “None at all.”  Chris, by then, was hanging on to the desk with both hands.  “Mrs. Greenberg, I don’t want to talk about this any more.”  Einstein says space-time.  There you have it.

    Of course, like the nit-pickers they were – the old sages had to work the ground.  When, exactly, is sunset:  four views, all carefully thought out.  What is a day - exactly?  When does it begin?  When, exactly, is the candle lit?

    Time, whatever that really is, is now calculated on atomic clocks to the second of a second, but like all Talmudic arguments, time is also subjective - as witness, our present confinement, the year this month has been.

    So, while the post-diaspora rabbis saved time, they also saved Judaism and they are now saving me from despair.

    There are four Hebrew words for expressions of time and one is ‘moed’.  Translations of the Torah call the ‘ohel moed’ the ‘tent of meeting’, but it really means the tent of where we meet at regular, specific times.  It’s what Rabbi Jamie and Eve and Elisabeth and all of you who have made these meetings and worked so hard to save Judaism like those scholars did in the old BCEs.