The ticking of the clock is uniformly, maddeningly constant. Tick, tick, tick. In equal, perfectly differentiated, precise segments. One second after another. Tick, tick, tick. A minute. An hour. One day. Another. Then a week. A month. A year. A lifetime.
Can you imagine how terrible it would be if the totality of our experience of time was as unchanging as its actual measure?
The clock is relentless, objective, mechanical. But God has created us to be the opposite; we have been created to be subjective, to engage with the world and with each other in such a way as to animate and give meaning to our experiences within the context of time. Certain moments and days are more significant than others – the birth of a child or grandchild, a wedding, etc.
Jewish time is anything but uniform. The week is a continual crescendo to the Sabbath. With the Sabbath’s arrival, we celebrate joyously only to reluctantly say farewell at havdalah before we start the cycle again. The Jewish year is an uneven temporal landscape where festivals and holidays, solemn observances and fasts, alter the meaning and significance of what might otherwise be just another day or season.
During no period are we any more conscious of the movement of time toward a festival as we are now, during the sefirah, the counting of the Omer. Each day, as we count the period from the second day of Passover through Shavuot, rather than measuring the ticking of time we are to mark the day with the counting of the Omer. Our sefirah, or counting, is celebrated first on the thirty-third of the counting (Lag B’Omer or Lag L’Omer among Sephardim) and at the culmination of the counting, Shavuot.
Why “pause” at Lag B’Omer to celebrate when the Torah makes no mention of the holiday? One reason for the holiday is that it is the passing of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. Another is the link between Lag B’Omer and the Bar Kochba revolt against the Roman Empire.
In both cases we see a clear example of finding meaning and significance in a moment in Jewish time.
We count time and find meaning in the events that define moments in time. But still, if these moments simply “happen upon us,” then the meaning and significance we find would be fleeting at best. The very movement of time imbued with meaning carries power.
We anticipate the coming of a special occasion. Our actions and our thoughts bring us into ever-sharper focus on the event and the celebration. Indeed, the occasion itself can be seen as a culmination of anticipatory moments. Isn’t this the sense we have when we celebrate a siyum?
In Judaism we learn that our accomplishments are reason for joy and religious satisfaction. For religious and learned Jews, there is no greater joy than that found in celebrating a siyum – celebrating the privilege of having had the opportunity to complete a significant part of Torah.
And yet we find that we never enjoy unbridled joy when we celebrate a siyum. I have often wondered at the strange, mixed emotion of the siyum. There is joy, absolutely, but also something else – an anxiety, a sadness, a sense, perhaps, of depletion. But why should a moment of such joy and accomplishment be tinged with any kind of negative emotion?
Even in our moments of joy, when time seems to be the repository of such powerful meaning, time is still time. It cannot be what it is not. It moves on, relentless. So in addition to our accomplishments there is the awareness of finality, of passing a moment of which the long road of life has fewer and fewer ahead.
Our ability to anticipate is diminished not by the anticipation itself but by our awareness that the road ahead is shortened. It is a blessing to celebrate an eighty-fifth birthday, but can one celebrate such a birthday without the awareness that, unlike when he was a young man of twenty, there cannot be more than a handful of such moments yet ahead?
It is as if while listening to a brilliant pianist practicing, it were possible to hear the soft echo of the metronome growing louder. The constant, steady beat intruding just enough to enter one’s awareness, even as the beauty of the playing remains dominant.