Emor 17 Iyar 5767 / May 5, 2007

“Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. We have liftoff.” For many of us this is a familiar count. We can picture in our mind’s eye the ignition of the engines and the flames that shot out of the bottom of the giant rockets that propelled ships spaceward. We watched as first Mercury and then Gemini and finally the Apollo spaceships launched. After a hiatus we watched with bated breath the launch of the shuttles; and they were even more bated after the tragic accidents first of Challenger and then of Columbia. Countdowns are part of our history.

Indeed, countdowns are also part of our personal lives. Before you know it someone will remind us that there are only 213 days to Chanukah. (Not all of them shopping days, however.) With Shabbat and the Jewish Holy Days, there are only 175 shopping days. Better get started now!) I bet that Lauren has been counting down the weeks and days to today, to her Bat Mitzvah day. Many of us have counted down the days to a major transition moment in our lives: be it major birthdays; how soon we can drive, drink, vote, before we go to college, get married, retire, and even before our next great vacation. Counting down offers us a growing sense of immanence; that the cherished moment is getting closer and closer.

But this morning’s Torah portion of Emor (actually in the section immediately before we began our selection of the triennial reading) reminds us that there is a different way to count, as you would have seen had you been here last night or indeed any evening minyan for the last month plus. We count in a very precise fashion. Last night after reciting the blessing, we declare: “Hayom Shnayim uShloshim Yom shehaym Arbahah Shavuot v’ Arbaah Yamim La’Omer: today is the thirty-second day, which is the equivalent of 4 weeks and 4 days of the Omer.” And this is a pattern we engage in for 7 weeks, leading up to the festival of Shavuot. In ancient times the count marked the transition from one agricultural season, the barley harvest to the early summer wheat harvest. For us, count agricultural days are not part of our purview, unless we are very obsessive about those tomato plants which are supposed to give us tomatoes in precisely 72 days. Rather, we continue the count to mark the transition from Passover to Shavuot; to mark the transition from a recollection of liberation from Egypt to the revelation of the Torah at Sinai.

My colleague Rabbi Sally Priesand, the first woman rabbi in America, who served in a community not far from mine in New Jersey, suggested that this counting method “gives us an opportunity to appreciate more fully every day of the count, reminding us that in Judaism the journey is as meaningful as the destination and we prepare ourselves for our encounter with God is as important as standing at Sinai.”

But our text, including the selection we read here this morning teaches us yet another lesson about time. It teaches us the value of sacred time. All of us are living ever-more stressed lives. “Time away” has disappeared, particularly with the advent of cell phones. I was reminded of this only this past week when I attended my annual convention. I can’t count the number of times that I heard cell phones go off in the midst of major presentations. And I suspect that few of those calls were of such a nature that a delay of an hour—checking on one’s phone messages after the session—would have made a difference. We are tempted ever more to be on 24/7. The Torah comes to remind us that we need to stop and stand apart from that mad rush through time; that there are moments in our lives called sacred time. The great Jewish thinker Abraham Joshua Heschel offered the idea of Shabbat, of the Sabbath, as an island in time. Rabbi Hayyim Herring at our convention proposed we re-brand Shabbat for the I-pod generation as the I-Pause day.

The text proposes that there are sacred times. Weekly there is Shabbat, both a reminder of God’s resting after creation, which perhaps should resonate with many of us who work meshugene hours, and of our liberation from Egypt, when our ancestors as slaves were granted no down time. The holiday cycle comes to remind us that we need to celebrate liberation, revelation, and our agricultural bounty—Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot, respectively--, but also that there is a moment of renewal and new beginnings (Rosh HaShanah) and also a time for personal-reflection and repentance (Yom Kippur). Add to that list, later holidays of Chanukah, with its reminder of light and restoration, of Purim, celebrating the joy of survival, and most recently Yom HaAtzamut, Israel Independence Day, which reminds us of the miracle of the modern Jewish State, and we have the core of the cycle. At the heart of this view of time is that we are part of a community; not just individuals with time on our hands. But as community members we need to pause celebrate, commemorate and yes re-charge our spiritual batteries. Just as we recognize that our cell phone batteries need periodic recharging so, too, we should be mindful that our souls require recharging. And the Jewish calendar is a reminder of that necessity.

One final point about time. Rabbi Yaakov Emden, one of the great rabbinic figures of the 18^th century, taught: “Time is rare and precious and money cannot buy it.” His statement is an iteration of a thought familiar to all of us; but a lesson that we disregard all too often. As I have seen too often we do not know when the Malach HaMavet and his colleague Malach HaTsarah, the Angel of Death and the Angel of Disruption and Illness, will enter our lives. What do we do with our time and with whom do we spend it?

Some years ago, a colleague of mine was on a mission to Israel and there the rabbis met with a leading American Orthodox rabbi who had fashioned a major urban congregation and had now made aliyah, had moved to Israel. He was now living not far from Jerusalem and was creating yet another vibrant community. He shared with the visiting rabbis the story that his daughter came to visit with her children, but also there were members of the community and he turned his attention to his other visitors. After a while his daughter interrupted him and said: “Abba, for 20 years I accepted this pattern of making your congregants first. But if you persist, neither I nor my children will come and visit again.” And what was most appalling to my colleague and his associates was that this rabbi rather than say: “My daughter was right. How can we as rabbis teach the importance of family when we neglect our own?” observed that this is the price rabbis have to pay for serving the community; congregants always come first. Frankly, this represents a tendency not only for rabbis—and I saw it with my father and occasionally have come out on the wrong side of the equation—but for everyone caught up with our jobs and our interests, to neglect those near and dear to us. The Harry Chapin song, “The Cats in the Cradle” comes to mind:

My child arrived just the other day
He came to the world in the usual way
But there were planes to catch and bills to pay
He learned to walk while I was away
And he was talkin' 'fore I knew it, and as he grew
He'd say "I'm gonna be like you dad
You know I'm gonna be like you"

If you know the song, you know that his son became just like him; with excuses and no time to see his father. We need to do better.

Time. A fleeting commodity; to be used wisely. We need to find the time not only to count down to special moments, but count up to those moments in time; that the transition moments are important too. We need to set aside sacred time to renew our souls. And yes, we need to set aside time for ourselves and our families. For time lost is time that can never be reclaimed.

Shabbat shalom.