My two-and-a-half year old son, Aaron, has a new morning routine. Upon waking up, he excitedly opens his bedroom curtains and exclaims, It's daytime!
Aside from being utterly adorable, his announcement is also very Jewish. Every morning upon waking up, Jews recite a prayer thanking God for the ability to distinguish between night and day.
Additionally, the morning service includes the yotzer: It praises creation, specifically the morning: Praised are you Adonai our God, creator of light and darkness ... In your goodness you daily renew creation. Ma'ariv Aravim is its equivalent, but in the evening. We count the 6 days a week that lead to Shabbat, and the beginning of each month with Rosh Chodesh. Just as every 7th day is a day of rest, every 7th year is a year of rest - a Sabbatical - and after 49 years, the 50th year is the Jubilee year; a sabbatical of sabbaticals, so to speak. We count 49 days of the Omer. And most recently, we counted the 29 days of Elul.
It's about time. I mean really, it's. about. time. It's the most important thing in our lives.
Today, we pray to be inscribed in the book of Life so that we can have more time. Because without time, we can't make memories, savor friendships, share love, or even do T'shuvah.
And today, we are all too aware of our finitude, our limited time. Lives are often taken before their time. At funerals, I often read this poem by Bialik:
Even in the best circumstances, the oldest can long for more time. There's always another hug to give, laugh to share, phone call to make. As the poet Bialik wrote: There was a man, and see, he is no more. Before his time his life was ended and the song of his life was broken. O, he had one more melody, and now that melody is lose forever, lost forever.
On Yom Kippur, our awareness of our limited time is heightened even further, as we recognize the tragic realities that can take away our time. In the Un'taneh Tokef prayer, we list various ways that we might not live to see another year.
The Un'taneh Tokef prayer confronts us with our mortality. We don't know what will happen in the year ahead - let alone in the day ahead. We may have longer lifespans than our ancestors, and we may no longer believe that God literally decides who shall die by stoning or by wild beast, but nonetheless, our current lives are filled with the very real fears of the prayer. We can substitute modern realities and fears: Who by COVID and who by gun shooting, who by car accident and who by lack of access to health care?
I've said this before, but it bears repeating. This day of Yom Kippur, the day of Atonement, can also be called Yom ulai, the day of maybe. Because maybe we will live another year. Maybe, we will have more time.
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The philosopher Martin Heidegger was obsessed with our finitude. In his opus, Being and Time, he asks a big question: What does it mean for a human being to be? He decides that our existence - our being - is tied to finite time.
In some ways, It isn't just that we only have a limited amount of time. Each of us is time. As Oliver Burkeman writes in his fantastic book, 4000 Weeks, Our limited time isn't just one among various things we have to cope with; rather, it's the thing that defines us as humans.
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But as much as we think about having enough time, worrying about the ulais, the maybes that can steal away time, and lamenting the fact that there never is enough time, how often do we stop to recognize the blessing of time?
As Burkeman writes:
If you can hold your attention, however briefly or occasionally, on the sheer astonishingness of being, and on what a small amount of that being you get—you may experience a palpable shift in how it feels to be here, right now, alive in the flow of time.
Instead of attempting the Sisyphean task of getting it all done, instead of doing more, what if we instead focused on doing better, or doing holy, or simply being?
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I love this vignette from one of my favorite books, The Little Prince:
There was a merchant who sold pills that had been invented to quench thirst. You need only swallow one pill a week, and you would feel no need of anything to drink.
"Why are you selling those?" asked the little prince.
"Because they save a tremendous amount of time," said the merchant. "Computations have been made by experts. With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every week."
"And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?"
"Anything you like..."
"As for me," said the little prince to himself, "if I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water."
Often, we don't know what to do with the time we have, other than worry about the time we don't have.
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I think that this morning's Torah portion is also about time:
I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day: I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life - that you and your offspring might live.
This section is as beautiful as it is inscrutable. What does this mean? Like many parts of our Torah, there are a multitude of beautiful interpretations and explanations. But I think this is telling us to look at the limited nature of our lives - our finitude - the reality that there are no guarantees - and to use the time we have for blessing.
Judaism is not about adding years to our lives, it's about adding life to our years.
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Easier said than done, I know. Quoting again from Four Thousand Weeks:
We should therefore try to treat every such experience with the reverence we’d show if it were the final instance of it. And indeed there’s a sense in which every moment of life is a “last time.” It arrives; you’ll never get it again—and once it’s passed, your remaining supply of moments will be one smaller than before. To treat all these moments solely as stepping-stones to some future moment is to demonstrate a level of obliviousness to our real situation that would be jaw-dropping if it weren’t for the fact that we all do it, all the time.
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Last night, I spoke of regret. I sometimes regret that I don't make use of the time that I have. Sometimes in the evening, the boys are asleep, the sermon is written, the Torah portion learned, and I have a few hours. I could play guitar, or call a friend I haven't spoken to in a while. I could go outside and exercise, or read a book. Sometimes, I am frozen in the paralysis of choice. I know that I can't do ALL of those things, and so rather than do one of them, I do none.
I don't think this is uncommon. There's a reason that there are so many programs and apps and life coaches and websites devoted to productivity and inspiration. And Yom Kippur helps me realize my folly.
If you somehow found out that you had one day left to live (God forbid), what would you do? Or rather, what would you do differently? We don't know when we will die, and we generally act as if there's always another tomorrow, another opportunity, another day. Judaism recognizes our human nature and tells us to repent one day before death. Since we don't know when that is, we should repent - perform t'shuvah, every day.
But we can go deeper than that.
It's not only that we don't know when we will die. The reality is that we are in fact dying! Every day and every moment is one less than we will have. And so, Judaism begs us to perform actions of consequence today, because tomorrow, our current opportunity will be gone.
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Time is not the enemy. Time is our humanity.
Like a two year old that wakes up in wonder exclaiming that it's daytime, we too can recognize the miracle of time, the opportunity of time - the holiness of time - and not its limitations. The choice is up to us. Choose life.
