As if you could kill time without injuring eternity

– Henry David Thoreau

In a song recorded many years ago by the Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger warbles, “Time, time, time is on my side…”

The sentiment is, or course, the attitude of youth. And arrogant youth at that. As we age and grow more insightful, it becomes eminently clear that time is not on our side, is not on the side of anything ephemeral; not on the side of anyone or anything that marks the passage of the minutes, hours, days, months and years.

Time does not take sides. Time is not our ally. It is as amoral as it is unrelenting. It is not just the marker by which we measure our days, it is the fundamental reality of corporeal existence – whether human or beast. Time moves on and on and on, carrying all living things with it. As we are carried along by time, we change at every moment.

We are not the same this moment as we were the last. With each moment and each day, we change from infant, to young man, to old man moving closer and closer to the end of the finite number of days allotted to us. Our tradition teaches that God has given each of us a predetermined number of minutes, days and hours in which to live – the exact amount of time needed to complete our mission. Not a single day too little. Not a single day too many. The Zohar tells us that, “Each and every day does its work.” Each day we must show some accomplishment. Indeed, each hour we should do so. And that accomplishment must be the sanctification of God’s name.

Time is time. It is the same for beasts of the field and for humans. The passage of time, the minutes, the hours, the days, cannot be shortened or lengthened. The ticking of the clock is unending and unrelenting. We cannot change time. Time does not give meaning to our lives. However, the grace that we have is that we can give meaning to time. Unlike the beasts of the field, we can choose what we do with the time allotted us; we can choose to bring meaning to time.

Time is a monotonous landscape. Like a gardener, we can cultivate that landscape. It is not time that has meaning but how we engage with God’s mitzvot in time that gives us meaning.

The beasts of the field do not mark the passing of the days but we Jews never stop being aware of time and its significance. We acknowledge not the mere passage of time but the opportunity we find in time to honor God. With the passing of each year, we can once again observe mitzvot we have not been able to observe since the year before – making kiddush on the first night of the Yom Tov, sitting in the Sukkah the first night, eating matzoh at the Seder, lighting candles the first night of Chanukah, reading the Megillah on Purim. We take note of the moment by reciting the she’hechiyanu. That is, we pause to recognize and thank God for allowing us to be alive and well, for allowing us to arrive at this moment, this la’z’man hazeh.

Especially now, at this time of the year, we pause each day as we count the Omer day by day, week by week for seven full weeks of days – the temporal distance between slavery and Sinai, between pain and hope, between being lost and having meaning. In doing so, we learn again that time forces upon us a linear experience. Nothing happens “all at once”. The days add up as we work to realize our goals. We count the minutes and hours as we move toward our destination.

In doing so, we make each moment matter.

A sign posted by a clock in a classroom: Time passes; will you?

“The grass withers, the flower fades; because the breath of the Lord blows upon it – surely the people is grass.” (Isaiah 40:7)

Our lives are gone in the blink of an eye.

When God identifies Himself by name from the Burning Bush, the name by which He identifies himself is derived from the Hebrew root “to be”. Although often translated “I am who I am” it is more correctly translated, “I am as I always will be”.

Unchanging. Untouched by time. Outside of time. Perfect.

Beyond time, God is perfect, but He has created us to be exactly the opposite. We exist in time. To give our lives meaning, to approach perfection demands that we approximate stopping time so that, for the briefest of moments, we experience what it means to be unchanging. We experience what it means to approach God.

How can we approach “timelessness”? First, by acknowledging that, while “time” is defined by its sameness, Jewish time is not. The work week moves toward the Sabbath and, with the Sabbath’s arrival, celebration. At Havdalah we reluctantly start the cycle again. The secular year is an unending, unchanging landscape. The Jewish year is an uneven temporal landscape, dotted with festivals and holidays, solemn observances and fasts that alter the meaning and significance of what would otherwise be just another day or season.

Days are not, for us, mere collections of hours. A day, this day, calls us to act; to learn Torah and to repent. The Torah is clear about this urgency in the Sh’ma: “These words, which I command you this day, make them as a sign upon your heart and between your eyes…”

Our Sages comment that the word hayom, “this day” means that “the Torah should be ever fresh in your mind, as though you received the Torah today.” As for the duty to repent, Rambam teaches, “A man should always regard himself as if his death were imminent and think that he may die this very hour, while still in a state of sin.

“This day”! Now! Each day matan Torah. Each day Yom Kippur – and with it a chance to claim the day, find the moment and bring meaning into our lives. This day. This moment. This moment, in its wholeness, has the potential for perfection in our lives. Catch it! Use it! Before it moves on to the next.

During no period are we any more conscious of the movement of time toward a festival as we are now, during the s’fira, the counting of the Omer. From the second day of Passover through Shavuot rather than measuring the ticking of time we mark the day with the counting of the Omer. Our s’firah, or counting, is celebrated first on the thirty-third of the counting, Lag BaOmer and at the culmination of the counting, Shavuot.

Why “pause” at Lag BaOmer to celebrate when the Torah makes no mention of the holiday? One reason for the holiday is that it is the passing of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. Another, more prevalent reason to celebrate, is the link between Lag BaOmer and the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Roman Empire.

In both cases, we see a clear example of finding meaning and significance in a moment in Jewish time and, in that moment, a reflection of eternity and perfection.

When we anticipate and prepare for an occasion, and find meaning in the events that define moments in time, our actions and our thoughts bring us into ever sharper focus on the event and the celebration. If these moments simply “happen upon us” then meaning would be fleeting at best. But when we make the moment meaningful, then the moment has power. Indeed, the occasion itself be a culmination of anticipatory moments. Isn’t this the sense we have when we celebrate a siyyum?

In Judaism, our accomplishments are reason for joy and satisfaction. For a religious and learned Jew, there is no greater joy than that found in celebrating a siyyum; celebrating the privilege of having had the opportunity to complete a significant part of Torah.

And yet… and yet… we find that we never enjoy unbridled joy when we celebrate a siyyum. Even at the siyyum we understand the moment will not last.

We cannot hold on to the “perfection” of the moment. It slips away from us, like sand through our fingers. Even in our moments of joy, time is still time. It moves on, relentless. So, in addition to our accomplishments, there is the awareness of finality, of passing a moment of which the road of life now has fewer and fewer of. It is a blessing to celebrate an eighty-fifth birthday, but can one celebrate such a birthday without the awareness that there cannot be more than a handful of such moments yet ahead?

The genuine Jew wants not only to celebrate the joys of yesterday, but even more to weigh the hopes of tomorrow against the certainty that tomorrow too shall pass.

It cannot help but be so. As Jews, we impose an “unevenness” on time, we give moments meaning and, in doing so, seek to slow it down if only for the fleeting chance to glimpse unchanging perfection.

Rabbi Safran’s recently published volume on all parshiyot ha’Torah available on Amazon Something Old, Something New: Pearls from the Torah: Rabbi Eliyahu Safran: 9781602803152: Amazon.com: Books

Annual influx of Jews of all backgrounds from Israel and abroad

Most Chabad centers host large annual get-togethers, including festival celebrations, High Holiday services, Chanukah menorah-lightings, fundraising dinners and, of course, their ever-expanding Passover Seders, where attendance topped out this year at around 3,000 at just one in Thailand.

But once a year, the Chabad-Lubavitch representatives of Meron, Israel, Rabbi YosefYitzchok and Chana Ruth Halperin, trump them all without having to put out so much as one promotional flyer.

That day is Lag BaOmer, this year on Wednesday night and Thursday, when well more than a half million Jews will flock, as they do every year, to the Halperins’ jurisdiction, a village of 938 residents containing the hilltop tomb of the great Kabbalist and Talmudic sage, Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, author of the holy Zohar.

It is the yahrzeit of the luminous sage and the day when Jewish tradition holds that healing, softened judgments and answers to other prayers are available, especially to those who ask for his intercession above. It is also the day in Jewish history that marks the end of a plague in which 24,000 students of the Talmudic sage, Rabbi Akiva, died for their lack of unity.

After a few unsuccessful attempts, Chabad.org finally landed a brief interview with the visibly harried rabbi in his office, which is only a short walk from the tomb. He had just returned from the regional government office that hands out licenses for, among other things, tent erection and sales. Halperin had gone to apply for a license for Chabad’s massive annual Lag BaOmer tent sale, devoted to the dissemination of books on Kabbalah and Chassidut at deeply discounted prices.

Plus a Kids’ Parade and Post-Holiday Shabbat Gathering

The task was one of three on the top of his “To Do” list, he said, along with checking a sample handout from the printer for his annual Lag BaOmer children’s parade and finalizing details for a big gathering he holds on the Shabbat after Lag BaOmer.

“Many people come here seeking miracles and salvations, as we believe are available by connecting to a righteous person of the Rashbi’s [acronym for Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai] level on his yahrzeit [anniversary of the passing],” explained Halperin. “By learning the inner dimension of the Torah through Chassidut or Kabbalah of which the Rashbi was the master, anytime, with someone else or by buying a book of your own on Chassidut, you can bring the Rashbi into your home all year.”

The momentous occasion marks the 33rd day of the counting of the Omer, the biblical commandment to count the 49 days between the Jewish people’s exodus from Egypt on Passover and their receiving of the Torah on Shavuot at Mount Sinai. The word lag in its title is the number represented by the two Hebrew letters, lamed and gimmel, that make up the word.

Jewish custom calls for certain mourning practices to be in place during this time to commemorate the passing of Rabbi Akiva’s students. Hair is not cut, music is not sounded, and weddings and other joyous events do not take place.

But because of the cessation of the plague and the explicit request of the Rashbi—who became one of Rabbi Akiva’s hand-picked students in a later generation—that the day of his passing on the 18th day of the Hebrew month of Iyar, Lag BaOmer, be a day of celebration and joy rather than mourning, virtually all of the mourning customs are suspended.

Bonfires, Parades and Lots of Haircuts

The mega-gathering in Meron and the countless celebrations that take place the world over on Lag BaOmer stand in stark contrast to the lack of unity that caused the plague that killed Rabbi Akiva’s students.

Since the 15th century, Jews have congregated at the site to celebrate on Lag BaOmer, in recent years with 24 hours of nonstop music and dancing, bonfires and words of Torah bellowing from speakers and stages scattered throughout the area. The day is also marked by the first cut of a boy’s hair at age 3, a Jewish custom known as an upsherin, symbolic of the biblical commandment prohibiting the picking of fruit on trees before they are three years’ old.

The tradition to light bonfires on Lag BaOmer eve commemorates the immense light that Rabbi Shimon introduced into the world via his mystical teachings. This was especially true on the day of his passing, Lag BaOmer, when he revealed to his disciples secrets of the Torah whose profundity and intensity the world had yet to experience. The Zohar relates that the house was filled with fire and intense light, to the point that the assembled could not approach or even look at Rabbi Shimon.

(Chabad.org)

Comedian-turned-politician Volodymyr Zelensky greets Ukraine’s Chabad rabbis

Ukraine’s President-elect Volodymyr Zelensky held what was called a “historic” meeting on May 6 in Kiev with the six leading representatives of the country’s Jewish community.

The meeting with the chief rabbis of Ukraine’s six most populous regions—geographically representing the whole country—included Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries Rabbi Shmuel Kaminezki of Dnipro, Rabbi Moshe Moskovitz of Kharkov, Rabbi Avraham Wolff of Odessa, Rabbi Shlomo Wilhelm of Zhitomir and Rabbi Pinchas Vishedski of Donetsk. Rabbi Moshe Asman, rabbi of the central Brodsky synagogue in Kiev, also attended.

The delegation was led by Kaminezki, who says the conversation touched on the enormous size of Ukraine’s Jewish community, which he estimates at some 500,000 individuals, and its status today. “This is the sixth-largest Jewish population in the world, and he was interested in every detail: why people stay, why they leave, what we’re all seeing in our individual communities.”

Zelensky, a Jewish comedian and television personality-turned-politician, won more than 70 percent of the vote in Ukraine’s April 21 run-off election, ousting sitting President Petro Poroshenko. In a case of real life mimicking television, Zelensky had previously played a schoolteacher who accidentally finds himself president of Ukraine, before finding himself president of Ukraine.

What is no joke (joke puns have proliferated in headlines since Zelensky announced his candidacy) is the high-profile visibility with which he has embraced his Jewishness, not a small factor in a country with as deep and troubled a history of anti-Semitism as Ukraine.

A Sense of Euphoria

“There is a sense of euphoria in the Jewish community that the man who won the presidency is openly Jewish. That’s historic,” says Moskovitz, chief rabbi and head Chabad emissary in the Kharkov region in the country’s east. “He won and with a big percentage, and his being Jewish wasn’t an issue in this campaign at all. That’s very heartening to everyone here.”

Anti-Jewish history in Ukraine, where the plurality of Jews in the Russian Empire once lived, runs deep. Even prior to the Holocaust, Ukraine was the site of the infamous pogroms of 1919-1921—a third conducted at the hands of Ukrainian nationalist bands—causing the death, either directly or due to disease, of some 150,000 Jews. Local collaboration in Holocaust-era German atrocities, including among other places at Kiev’s Babi Yar killing grounds, is also an established fact.

While anything close to such terror has long been a thing of the past, a more casual anti-Semitism has prevailed for years. In recent decades, street-level anti-Semitism was a staple of everyday life for Ukrainian Jews, although such incidents have fallen rapidly in the last 10 years and even more in the last five. In fact, it’s come to the point where local Jews do not place it among their immediate worries, saying they feel more comfortable displaying their Jewishness openly in Ukraine than they do in many parts of western Europe.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Jewish politicians throughout Ukraine, from the local to the national level, have most often either buried or shied away from their Jewish identity. Non-Jews, if or when accused of being Jewish as part of an opposition smear campaign, vehemently denied it, often rushing to publicly tout their Orthodox Christian beliefs.

Not so with Zelensky, whose open Jewish identity was not a factor during the election and his eventual landslide victory.

Similar presidential meetings with rabbis have taken place in the last nearly three decades, but never with such publicity. In this case, not long after his meeting with the Chabad rabbis, Zelensky posted a picture and a long statement to his popular Instagram page, garnering 38,000 likes in the first few hours.

In his post, Zelensky quoted Kaminezki as telling him, “A little bit of light drives away a lot of darkness. There are three central factors behind the success of your leadership: justice, honesty and peace. Never do what you would not wish to be done to you.”

Difficulties as a Jewish Child in the Soviet Union

Zelensky hails from the industrial city of Krivoy Rog, and in the meeting recalled to the rabbis the difficulties he experienced growing up as a Jewish child in the Soviet Union. These days, Chabad has affiliated Jewish communities in some 160 cities and towns throughout the country, and Zelensky was briefed on the vast network of schools, synagogues and social-services centers under its auspices.

For the last five years, Ukraine has grappled with war in the breakaway eastern regions of the country, which although less intense still simmers, and many hope Zelensky’s approach to settling the conflict will be more pragmatic than previous attempts. Additionally, one of his strong selling points during the campaign was his profile as a political neophyte in a country struggling with endemic corruption.

“He is very serious about his forthcoming job as president of Ukraine and accomplishing good for the entire country,” Kaminezki, chief rabbi of the Dnipro—a city formerly known as Dnepropetrovsk, and home to the sprawling Menorah Center, the largest Jewish center in the world—tells Chabad.org. “Without even getting into the Jewish aspect, this is a clean, honest individual; educated, solid morals. There is a lot of hope here.”

The meeting was held in Zelensky’s 21st-floor Kiev office, from which the killing grounds of Babi Yar can be made out. Kaminezki told the president-elect—who at the conclusion was presented with a Chumash (Five Books of Moses) with a Russian translation—that his election was a part of the healing process of the country, particularly its Jewish community.

“The emissaries who were sent here by the Rebbe [Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory] didn’t come here for a certain amount of time; we’re here until Moshiach comes,” Kaminezki told Zelensky, whose Instagram also quoted him as saying there was no contradiction to being a Jew and a patriotic Ukrainian. “We believe that Jews can live and grow here, that there is a great future for the Jews of Ukraine.”

            (Chabad.org)