Measuring and Treasuring Time (Emor 5775)

We can do just about anything with time. Consider all the actions or verbs we associate with time: add, bend, count, delay, extend, find, get, have, invest . . . just about anything. 

Alicja Kwade's 'Void of the Moment in Motion'

This is a season for counting days -- counting up all the projects and learning we've accomplished approaching the end of a school year, counting down to the final days of high school for our seniors. It also is a season of counting in Jewish terms -- we traditionally count each day between Passover and Shavuot. We learn that custom from this week's Torah portion, Emor. The portion also reminds us about counting days in the week for Shabbat and counting other moments in time for festivals. 

It is a way of saying that every moment in time should be valued and treasured; no moment should be taken for granted.

To illustrate our relationship with time, I shared a corny story with my students this week.  A woman was on the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall in Jerusalem and wanted to check the time.  But her cell phone battery had died so she asked a stranger for the time.  The stranger replied, "I don't know the time; I don't have a watch or phone." "Then how do you keep track of time," she asked.   "Oh, during the day," he told her, "I ask people on the street for the time."  

"But what about at night?" she asked, "How do you know at night what time it is?"  He answered, "For that I have a shofar!" [The shofar is a wind instrument made from a ram's horn and sounded for religious purposes.]  "How can you possibly tell time with a shofar," she asked incredulously.  "When it's dark and I don't know the time, I open my window and sound my shofar as loud as a I can. Inevitably a neighbor yells back at the sound of the shofar, 'Do you know what time it is?!?'  I reply, 'No, what time is it?' The angry neighbor says something like, "For goodness sake, it's 3:30 in the morning."  Then I know the time.*

The shofar story illustrates that some of us are relaxed about time and others are stressed about it.  With all the stress that many of us experience around time it is easy to imagine that time has power over us.  But Torah teaches that we have power over time.  We do the counting. The only 'power' that time has over us, is what we give up to time when it loses all of its value to us.  When we waste it or squander it.

More than merely measuring time, we also are the ones who are responsible for valuing or squandering time.  We are the ones who make time count.  There is another clue to this in this week's Torah portion.  When we are instructed to count the days after Passover, the term for counting is doubled.

This, it seems to me, hints at the double meaning for the word in Hebrew.  The word used in Hebrew for 'counting' is taken from the same Hebrew root as the word for story or story-telling.  Counting stories.  In other words, we not only measure time but also we give it meaning through the stories we create, the meaning we make out of that time.

Perhaps that is the meaning of Psalm 90 - "So teach us to number our days that we develop (or we become storytellers with) a heart of wisdom."  May we learn to treasure time beyond measure so as to discover the special purpose in each moment and to create the meaning for ourselves that links one moment to another.

*  I learned a version of this story from the blog of Rabbi Nate Crane - thanks to him.