Rabbi David Walk

THE PARSHA

WITH RABBI DAVID WALK

Tempus Fugit

When I was in high school, I had a friend who drove classmates crazy. He would sit behind another student, saying, ‘Tick, tick, tick, tick, etc.’ At some point, he’d blurt out, ‘Boom!’ The poor, unfortunate student would generally jump out of his/her seat, get a nasty look from the teacher. You never knew when the ‘Boom’ was coming. The ‘time bomb’ could go off anytime during the 42-minute class. It drove people insane. It never happened to me, but I witnessed it many times. The fascinating thing about the victims, they all claimed that time stood still. Waiting for the inevitable made the clock crawl. Our special Torah reading this week also raises some interesting questions about time.

This week we read parshat Hachodesh, which contains the mitzva to establish a

calendar. It begins like this: This month shall be to you the head of the months; to you it shall be the first of the months of the year (Shmot 12:2). Then the Torah turns to the mitzvot of Pesach. But I want to stay with the calendar.

The word for month is CHODESH, whose root is CHADASH or ‘new’. Our month, therefore, begins with newness, which we understand to mean the first sighting of the new moon. Then comes the crucial word, LACHEM, which means ‘for (or ‘to’) you’. Which our Sages understood to mean the collective ’you’ of the Jewish community, represented by the Sanhedrin, great court in Yerushalayim. We, the Jewish people, declare the months which, in turn, establish the calendar.

Fine, but why? We already had a Divinely ordained time system in place: Shabbat. God declared and sanctified Shabbat from the time of Adam. The whole calendar could be like Shavuot. Count a certain number of weeks and then celebrate the next holiday. Why do we need a second, artificial system?

There’s a famous MUSAR (spiritual lesson) idea that we were commanded to make this calendar to remind to take control of the time allotted to us. I’d like to suggest another.

This mitzva was, of course, given to Moshe (there was a role for Aharon, too). This is the first mitzva given through Moshe. There’s also only one chapter of Tehillim attributed to Moshe, and I believe they are connected.

Psalm 90 begins, ‘A prayer of Moshe, the man of God.’ However, the content of the poem doesn’t really sound like a prayer. It sounds more like a philosophic statement about the differences between God and humanity. ‘Before mountains were born... from eternity to eternity You are God... For a thousand years in your eyes are like the passing of yesterday, like a watch of the night (verses 2 & 4).’ God’s nature is to be forever; God’s personal name is the Eternal (Y-H-V-H).

What about humans? ‘The days of our years are but seventy years, and if one is strong, eighty (verse 10).’ Humanity is fleeting; we are ADAM from the dust and to the dust.

Now we can discuss why there must be a human calendar alongside the Divine weekly schedule. There are two concepts of time. The human fleeting clock, and the Divine forever clock. The first mitzva given to the Jewish nation is to deal with that incomprehensible reality. We are finite, but living an infinite system.

When we sanctify the month, establish the calendar, commemorate the Festivals, we are acknowledging our ephemeral existence, but we are still connected to the Infinite. Because when you keep the Torah, you really can go to Infinity and beyond!