Jewish Time
Different cultures tell different stories. The great novelists of the nineteenth century, for example, wrote fiction that is essentially ethical. Jane Austen and George Eliot explored the connection between character and happiness. In this, they were greatly influenced by the Bible, and there is a palpable continuity between their work and the book of Ruth. Charles Dickens, following in the tradition of the prophets, wrote about society and its institutions, and the ways in which they can fail to honour human dignity and justice.
By contrast, today’s fascination with stories like Star Wars, Batman, Spiderman and their many variants is conspicuously dualistic. There is a force of evil, separate from and independent of, God and the good. Evil is “out there” in the universe, not just “in here” within the human heart. These stories are closer to myth than monotheism.
Jack Miles, in his God: A Biography, draws the distinction by way of a comparison between Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.1.Jack Miles, God: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 397–98.
Oedipus is doomed from the beginning of the story. The Delphic oracle has spoken; Oedipus’s fate is sealed; the more he acts to avoid it the more tightly enmeshed in it he becomes. Watching Oedipus is cathartic. We are purged of our emotions of fear, sorrow and grief and become reconciled to our mortality.
The drama of Hamlet, however, lies within the mind, the soul, of Hamlet himself. The conflict is not between human intention and blind fate, but between the two forces at work in Hamlet’s character, “the native hue of resolution” versus “the pale cast of thought.” Hamlet’s battle, like Jacob’s wrestling match with the angel, is with himself. Tanakh, as Miles concludes, “is far nearer in spirit to Hamlet than to Oedipus Rex.” It is a literature, not of fate but of freedom.
There is, however, one aspect of Tanakh, systematically evident in the narrative of Genesis, that is rare to the point of uniqueness. It is a story without an ending which looks forward to an open future rather than reaching closure. This defies narrative convention.2.See Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).
Normally we expect a story to create a tension that is resolved in the final page. That is what gives art a sense of completion. We do not expect a sculpture to be incomplete, a poem to break off halfway, a novel to end in the middle. Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony is the exception that proves the rule.
Yet that is what the Bible repeatedly does. Consider the Ḥumash, the five Mosaic books. The Jewish story begins with a repeated promise to Abraham that he will inherit the land of Canaan. Yet even when we reach the end of Deuteronomy, the Israelites have still not crossed the Jordan. The Ḥumash ends with the poignant scene of Moses on Mount Nebo (in present-day Jordan) seeing the land – to which he has been journeying for forty years but is destined not to enter – from afar.
Nevi’im, or Prophets, the second part of Tanakh, ends with Malachi foreseeing the distant future, understood by tradition to be the messianic age:
See, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the coming of the great and awesome day of the Lord. He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers…” (Malachi, 3:24)
Nevi’im, which includes the great historical as well as prophetic books, thus concludes neither in the present or the past, but by looking forward to a time not yet reached. Ketuvim, Writings, the third and final section, ends with King Cyrus of Persia granting permission to the Jewish exiles in Babylon to return to their land and rebuild the Temple. After thirty-nine books, and more than a thousand years in real time, we are almost back where we began, with Abraham in Ur of the Chaldees about to begin his journey to the Promised Land.
Torah, Nevi’im, Ketuvim: none concludes with an ending in the conventional sense. Each leaves us with a sense of a promise not yet fulfilled, a task not yet completed, a future seen from afar but not yet reached. The paradigm case – the model on which all others are based – is the ending of the book of Genesis in this Parashat Vayeḥi.
Recall that the story of the people of the covenant begins with God’s call to Abraham to leave his land, birthplace and father’s house and travel “to a land which I will show you” (12:1). Yet no sooner does Abraham arrive than he is forced by famine to go to Egypt. That is the fate repeated by Jacob and his children. Genesis ends not with life in Israel but with a death in Egypt:
Then Joseph said to his brothers, “I am about to die. But God will surely come to your aid and take you up out of this land to the land He promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” Then Joseph made the sons of Israel swear an oath and said, “God will surely come to your aid, and then you must carry my bones up from this place.” So Joseph died at the age of a hundred and ten. And after they embalmed him, he was placed in a coffin in Egypt. (40:24–26)
Again, a hope not yet realised, a journey not yet ended, a destination just beyond the horizon.
In great works, form and content work together, each reinforcing the other in an indissoluble whole. The unfinished nature of Genesis links to the theme which ends the Joseph story: forgiveness. Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, offers a profound insight into the connection between forgiveness and time. Human action, she argues, is potentially tragic. We can never foresee the consequences of our acts, but once done, they cannot be undone. We know that:
…he who acts never quite knows what he is doing, that he always becomes “guilty” of consequences he never intended or even foresaw, that no matter how disastrous the consequences of his deed, he can never undo it…All this is reason enough to turn away with despair from the realm of human affairs and to hold in contempt the human capacity for freedom.3.Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 233.
What transforms the human situation from tragedy to hope, Arendt argues, is the possibility of forgiveness:
Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover…. Forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven.4.Ibid., 237, 241.
Atonement and forgiveness are the supreme expressions of human freedom – the freedom to act differently in the future than one did in the past, and the freedom not to be trapped in a cycle of vengeance and retaliation. Only those who can forgive can be free. Only a civilization based on forgiveness can construct a future that is not an endless repetition of the past. That, surely, is why Judaism is the only civilization whose golden age is in the future.
It was this revolutionary concept of time based on human freedom that Judaism contributed to the world. Many ancient cultures believed in cyclical time, in which all things return to their beginning. The Greeks developed a sense of tragic time, in which the ship of dreams is destined to founder on the hard rocks of reality. Europe of the Enlightenment introduced the idea of linear time, with its close cousin, progress.
Judaism believes in something else, neither endless repetition nor inevitable progress, but covenantal time, the story of the human journey in response to the divine call, with all its backslidings and false turns, its regressions and failures, yet never doomed to tragic fate, always with the possibility of repentance and return, always sustained by the vision with which the story began, of the Promised Land, the new society, the place where justice and compassion triumph over the evil that lurks within the human heart, where human virtue and divine blessedness meet in the consummation of the covenant that we call redemption. As Harold Fisch has put it: “The covenant is a condition of our existence in time…We cooperate with its purposes never quite knowing where it will take us, for ‘the readiness is all.’” In a lovely phrase, he speaks of the Jewish imagination as shaped by “the unappeased memory of a future still to be fulfilled.”5.Harold Fisch, A Remembered Future: A Study in Literary Mythology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 11, 19.
Tragedy gives rise to pessimism. Cyclical time leads to acceptance. Linear time begets optimism. Covenantal time gives birth to hope. These are not just different emotions. They are radically different ways of relating to life and the universe. They are expressed in the different kinds of stories people tell. Jewish time always faces an open future. The last chapter is not yet written. The messiah has not yet come. Until then, the story continues – and we, together with God, are its co-authors.