The Duality of Time
The human genome has taught us that the microcosm is a map of the macrocosm. From a single cell, one can reconstruct an entire organism. Does this apply to religion? Can one tiny Jewish law, a single cell as it were, reveal the totality of Judaism?
The phrase, “ “Count seven full weeks…Count fifty days. “” commands us to count each night between Pesach and Shavuos. What is the law for someone who forgot one day? May he continue to count the rest, or has he forfeited the mitzvah? The Halachos Gedolos (8th century) ruled that the person should stop counting. Hai Gaon (10th century) disagreed. What are their reasons?
According to the Halachos Gedolos, the key phrase is, “ “Seven full/perfect weeks.” “One who missed a day cannot satisfy the need for perfection. In this view, the 49 days constitute a single religious act. If one part is missing, the whole is defective. This is like a scroll missing a single letter; the entire Torah scroll is invalid. For Hai Gaon each day is a separate command. Hence, failure to count one day is no impediment to counting the others. Compare this to not praying on a given day. That neither excuses nor prevents one from praying on subsequent days. Each day stands alone, unaffected by what happened before or after. These two ways of understanding the count, as a single extended process or as forty nine distinct acts, are both honored in the final law: We count all days but without a blessing.
These two perspectives on time have always been part of Judaism. When Shammai the Elder discovered a delicacy he would say, “ “This is for Shabbat.” “ If he later found something better, he would put aside the second for the holy day and eat the first. From the beginning of the week, he was conscious of its end. Here, time is not a mere sequence of moments. It has a purpose and destination. Hillel had a different approach, based on the verse, “ “Blessed be the L-rd day by day.” “ (Ps. 68:20) In his view, each day should be lived without regard to any other. Each day is a separate universe, with its own challenge and unique response.
Ancient civilizations saw time as cyclical. Each day has its sunrise and sunset; every year its sequence of seasons; and life itself is a repeating tale of birth, growth, decline, and death. Beneath these series of eternal recurrences, the world remains the same. “As King Solomon noted: Generations come and go, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and sets, and hurries back to where it rises.” “
Priestly time is cyclical. Each part of the day, the week, and the year has its specific sacrifice, unaffected by outside events. In this sense, Jewish law is priestly. All else may change, but not Torah. It represents eternity in the midst of time.
In this respect, Judaism did not innovate. And yet another form of time was also born in ancient Israel; time as an arena of change. Tomorrow need not be the same as yesterday. There is nothing immutable about the way we live. Time is not a series of moments traced on the face of a watch, always moving yet always the same. It is a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Each moment has a meaning, which can only be grasped if we understand where we have come from and where we are going. This is time not as it is in nature, but as it is in history.
The prophets were the first to see this. A prophet is one who sees the end in the beginning. While others are at ease, he foresees the catastrophe. While others are mourning, he anticipates the eventual consolation. One famous example is a smiling Rabbi Akiva pondering the Temple ruins. When asked why he was smiling, he replied: Now that I have seen the prophecies of destruction, shall I not believe in the promise of restoration? Rabbi Akiva saw the future-in-the-now. Knowing the previous chapters of the story, he understood not only the present chapter, but also where it was leading. That is prophetic consciousness - where events are determined by human choices and themes foretold long in advance.
Biblical festivals follow both patterns. They celebrate the cyclical seasons: Pesach is spring, Shavuos the first fruits, and Sukkos is the autumn harvest. But they also commemorate history. Pesach is the Exodus, Shavuos the giving of the Torah, and Sukkos the forty years of wandering in the wilderness.
Even the counting of the Omer has these two dimensions. The forty-nine days represent time in nature, during which each day brought forth its own blessing in the form of new grain. But the Omer is also part of historical time, recalling the journey from Egypt to Sinai, from Exodus to Revelation.
Hebrew has two different words for“ freedom: chofesh and cherut. Chofesh“ is the freedom a slave acquires when he no longer has a master, and does what he wants. This sort of freedom cannot be the basis of a free society. If everyone does what they like, the result will be freedom for the strong but not the weak. A free society requires restraint and the rule of law. That is what the Jews chose at Sinai. We call this Cherut, the freedom to do what one ought.
One cannot travel directly from tyranny to a free society (witness Bosnia and Iraq). In the tale called time, every stage is necessary. This is the significance of, “ “Count seven full, complete, unbroken weeks.” /“
We have traced this argument from Geonim, to Talmudic Sages, and priests vs. prophets. There is the voice of G-d in nature, and the call of G-d in history. There is the word of G-d for all time, and the word of G-d for this time. There are aspects of the human condition that do not change, but there are others that do. Cyclical time is deeply conservative; historical time is profoundly revolutionary. Both find their expression in the counting of the Omer, and in Judaism. Thus an apparently minor detail in Jewish law turns out, on inspection, to tell us much about the entire Judaic weltanschauung.
Torah offers us stability and change. We must honor these two powerful forces in our lives. But that is not enough. We must make it available to others. To see G-d both in nature and also in history is the distinctive contribution of Judaism to Western civilization, and we find it in one of the most apparently minor commands: to count the days from liberation to Revelation.