While we might tend to think of a home, or a city, or a nation as a place, the universe and everything in it is part of a unified, multidimensional structure of space and time. Physicists today refer to this structure with the single word spacetime. While it is possible to measure things across space – e.g., with a ruler – and measure things across time – e.g., with a clock – in reality, whenever we measure a change in one dimension, we are measuring a change in all the dimensions of spacetime together.
This is not a new idea; even Aristotle and the ancient Greeks understood that space and time are somehow related. However, they reasoned that space and time had to be separate containers of the cosmos. Until recently, scientific conceptions of space and time assumed that separation. For example, as late as the 17th century, Newton reasoned that one could travel through space in all directions, but that time had to be unidirectional; it flowed like a river from past, to present, to future at a constant rate. Then, in the 20th century, Einstein used math and experimental measurements that were unavailable to earlier generations to prove that Aristotle and Newton were wrong. Time and space can bend and distort each other. Do something to one of them, and you do something to both.
For practical purposes, in our everyday lives, we don’t need to concern ourselves with cosmic Einsteinian matters of spacetime. We rely on clocks to mark time, and maps to mark the boundaries of our homes, cities, and nations. However, our practical notion of such borders and boundaries is as arbitrary and incomplete as Aristotle’s and Newton’s notions of space within space and time. Fixed national borders are a relatively recent phenomenon. The geopolitical notion of fixed national boundaries began in the 17th century with the Peace of Westphalia – a treaty that ended the religious wars in Europe. Before then, anywhere one went, national boundaries were fluid – they were bent and distorted according to the fortunes of wars, famines, floods, and other major events.
The Torah understood all of this long before Aristotle, Newton, the Treaty of Westphalia, or Einstein. In The Guide for the Perplexed Maimonides interpreted the language and narrative of the story of creation in The Book of Bereshit. He reasoned from the Torah that time is a construct – a property of Gd’s design – that works in conjunction with the Divine constructs of space and motion. In other words, in the work of Creation Gd fashioned a universe in which elements of time by nature have an impact on elements of space. Do something to one of them, and you do something to both.
In the Torah narrative, the moment when the Children of Israel become a nation, and the arrival of the Children of Israel in the land of Israel are separate events. Today, nationality in almost every country is a product of geopolitics. Borders – a factor of space – do much to shape a national pride. Histories and traditions – a factor of time – do much to shape a national sense of legitimacy. We can say that we are a nation because we have historical ties to the land. If space and time are unified, then we should be able to point to a moment when we became a nation with a distinct people who were to ultimately inhabit a distinct land.
If one were to try to assign the exact moment that the Jewish people became a nation, one could examine the Torah’s text to point to the first reference to Israel as a nation – i.e., the first instance of the term Am Yisrael. We find that it is when Pharaoh articulates his reason for discriminating against the Jews. It was not so much that we were a nation, but that the Children of Israel were not Egyptian. Major events such as the crossing of the sea, and the emergence on the other side are also possibilities for the birth of this nation. However, such moments are not definitive in the text; they are more like conditions that were necessary, but not sufficient to define a nation.
There is one moment which captures the unique essence and arrival of Jewish nationality. It is when the Children of Israel are given the commandment to establish the Jewish calendar. It is a pivotal – transformative – moment because it is the only commandment explicitly described as being delivered in the land of Egypt. As such it is the major event that truly distinguishes the Jewish people for the ensuing 3500 years.
The mitzvah is to have our own calendar to account for time in a way that was entirely different from how the Egyptians and all other nations marked time. The Egyptians were a sun-based society whose highest deity was their sun god. The Jewish people were instructed to use the motion of the moon as their fundamental calendric marker. This distinguished the Children of Israel from the Egyptians in both a cultural and a functional sense.
Rabbi Sampson Raphael Hirsh notes that the Jewish people had to establish the calendar based on the sighting of the moon. They were to convene a court to take testimony from witnesses and officially establish whether a month was going to be 29 days long or 30 days long (the lunar cycle is 29 1/2 days long; months are either 29 or 30 days). The entire Jewish world, from Greece to Babylon, looked to Israel to determine the dates of Passover and other festivals. Rabbi Hirsch notes as follows.
It was just in this looking and waiting that these communities recognized themselves as members and part of a great whole, and could feel that their festivals were times arranged freely by themselves for the coming together of Gd and his people.
Jewish historian Yeshayahu Gafni has noted that the Jewish people have different practices in almost every area of religious communal practice. There are different siddurim for Ashkenaz, Sephard, etc. There are different standards of Kashrut among different communities of Torah observant Jews. Yet, there is one thing that all Jews everywhere agree on: the Jewish Calendar.
The Jews established a homeland in the dimension of space by first establishing its nationhood in the dimension of time. This is not to undermine or diminish the centrality and importance of the land of Israel; rather it is to establish its identity as a fixture, and feature of national life that extends beyond geopolitical boundaries to a fully multi-dimensional presence in spacetime. This unites the Jews through signature moments of history: Exodus, Sinai, the destructions of the Temple, the translation of the Septuagint, and the release of Joseph from prison…all of which are marked one way or other in Jewish ritual or liturgy. It also unites us today as a nation with a legitimate, historical claim to the same land that we were given before borders were fixed and time and space were understood by all nations to be the interwoven threads of the fabric of Gd’s design for the creation of the universe.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Rosenblatt and Dr. Terry Neiman
