“It is because of what the Lord did for me when I went out of Egypt” (Ex. 13:8). In these words tradition heard the continuous present, the past that lives on, the event that speaks to me in the first person singular.
There is something quite distinctive about the biblical approach to time. The historical books of the Bible are the first of their kind by several centuries, long before the Greek writer Herodotus (fifth century BCE), known as “the father of history.” Yet the biblical narrative is never mere history, a recording of what happened because it happened, whether to entertain or to instruct. Nor is it myth, a prescientific attempt to explain why the world is as it is.
It is nothing less than the sustained attempt to see events through the prism of faith, as the ongoing interaction between heaven and earth, command and response, the divine word and the human success or failure in hearing and acting on the word. It is saturated by the idea of covenant as the partnership initiated by God and entered into by mankind, making them partners in the work of redemption.
There is nothing preordained in this narrative. By giving humanity free will, God has made human beings His coauthors in writing the script of history. Yet it is not open-ended either, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
History, as understood by the Torah, is the story of how human beings, led only by the sound of a voice, a call, began the long journey, not yet complete, to a Promised Land and a messianic age where people construct a society that honors the image of God in others, sanctifying life, building families of love and trust, shaping communities by the principles of justice and compassion, and living at peace with their neighbors.
No religion has conferred on mankind a greater responsibility. We are not, in this narrative, condemned to fail because of hubris or “original sin.” We are not confined to pure submission to the will of God. Instead, God has entrusted His great creation to our safekeeping, and though the Hebrew Bible tells us that Israel failed often, it also tells us that God has never lost faith in us, though we may sometimes lose our faith in Him.
The concept of covenant is intimately related to time. “I have chosen him,” says the God of Abraham, “so that he may instruct his children and his household after him to keep to the way of the Lord, by doing what is right and just” (Gen. 18:19). The achievement of a free and just society is the work not of a moment but of many generations. Israel must experience exile before it can fully understand the concept of home. It must undergo slavery if it is to long with all its being for freedom. It must walk through the valley of the shadow of death to know in its bones the sanctity of life.
That is why covenant is essentially linked to education and memory, for the journey is long – longer than many lifetimes – and only when each generation hands on to the next what it has heard and learned and prayed for does the journey continue; and only if the journey continues is history redeemed. History has meaning only for those who believe it has meaning.
In his book Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, Yosef Chaim Yerushalmi makes the fascinating observation that, having seen God in history and written an entire library of historical works, the Jewish people suddenly stopped writing history at the time of the destruction of the Second Temple. The last great Jewish historian was Josephus, who wrote his works in the first century of the Common Era. From then on, throughout the rabbinic literature of the mishnaic, talmudic, and medieval periods, there is virtually no historical writing, with the exception of the sixteenth century, when, in response to the Spanish expulsion, several works appeared, trying to make sense of the tragic fate of Jews in the Diaspora.
