Time

Rabbi Lisa Levenberg

Yom Kippur Afternoon - Saturday, September 22, 2007

On Erev Rosh Hashanah, Rabbi Fleekop invited us to celebrate the Birthday of the World by appreciating the beauty of the natural world and recognizing how essential nature is for our physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Cherishing nature and honoring our natural resources is a fundamental Jewish value. Of all the wonders of the natural world, perhaps the most amazing is the element of time. Time is our most precious natural resource. Just as we have a responsibility to care for our water, air, trees, and land, we have an obligation to cherish time, to treat time as sacred. And like other natural resources, time is often misused, through greed or thoughtlessness.

Just as we waste water and fuel, we waste time on meaningless things. Not through malice, but through inattention, hours of our work or school days, or our evenings at home, slip through our fingers unnoticed, lost to the delights of youtube, text messaging, or the Colbert Report. And in the same way that we Americans are sometimes criticized for consuming more than our fair share of the world’s resources, sometimes we are also guilty of stealing other people’s time. We steal other people’s time when we arrive late (a sin I continually struggle with!), keep other people waiting, or don’t follow through on our commitments, creating more work for others.

Last month, a reader wrote in to Action Line to share a humorous story: A man had an appointment with a new dentist, and filled out a stack of forms, including one which acknowledged that he would be held responsible for a fee for any missed appointments. When his dentist kept him waiting for 45 minutes that day, the patient sent him a letter informing the dentist that he, the patient, would expect payment for the missed appointment! The patient was just letting off steam, but sure enough, a few days later the dentist sent him a check! This was an acknowledgement on both sides that time has value, and that we wrong one another when we treat other people’s time as insignificant.

Sometimes, however, when we find ourselves with unexpected time, we don’t know what to do with it. Like “intrusive” wildlife appearing in suburban backyards, we find this unplanned time scary and dangerous…so what do we do? We kill it. The very expression “killing time” reflects our discomfort with unscheduled time. When we accidentally arrive half an hour early for carpool pickup, instead of delighting in 30 minutes of respite, we feel the need to keep busy, hastily devising a quick errand or at least a little window shopping to fill those 1800 seconds yawing blackly before us. In the alphabet of sins we confess during Yom Kippur, surely the sin of “killing time” should weigh upon us.

In addition to our sins of wasting time and killing time, we also pollute time. Time can become polluted, just like air and water can. We pollute time when we fill it with negativity. We pollute time when we spend it complaining, nursing resentment, carrying grudges or gossiping. In the psalms, we learn, “Who is the one who desires life, and loves many days, to see good? Keep your tongue from evil, and your lips from speaking guile.” Using our time to spread rumors or gossip is not only harmful to others—it poisons the very moments in which we ourselves live.

On Erev Rosh Hashanah, Rabbi Fleekop introduced Richard Louv’s groundbreaking Last Child in the Woods. In his book, Louv talks about how both youth and adults have become alienated from nature. And this is perhaps the greatest heartbreak in the experience of time as a sacred natural resource: just as we have become distanced from nature, uncomfortable in open space, we have become alienated from, almost afraid of, unstructured time. Just as we have learned to tune out nature, so we have taught ourselves to tune out time. Our society has erected barriers between ourselves and nature, driving down a road instead of walking down a path. Similarly, we use ipods and cell phones to tune out time, to shield ourselves from the overwhelming majesty of time alone. We no longer fully experience the time we are in, desperately afraid of the quiet.

As a community and as individuals, we have all, at times, wasted time, killed time, polluted time, feared time. The good news, though, is that while time is a limited resource, it is continually refreshed and renewed. Unlike the sometimes irreversible fates that our forests, oceans, and skies face, each moment of time lies before us clean, perfect, and unblemished. Literally every moment is an opportunity for us to turn away from our tendencies to waste time, lose time, kill time, or buy time, and instead cherish time as sacred.

In challenging ourselves to cherish time, it is helpful to remember that old metaphor that is the stock and trade of every time management guru, as retold by Ken Fussichen: the rocks in the pickle jar. First the expert filled the jar with fist-sized rocks. When the jar was filled to the top and no more rocks would fit inside, he asked his students, "Is this jar full?"

Everyone in the seminar said, "Yes." Then he said, "Really?" He pulled out a bucket of gravel and dumped some into the jar, shaking it to allow some pieces of gravel to work themselves down into the spaces between the big rocks. Then he asked the group once more, "Is the jar full?" By this time the class was onto him. "Probably not," one of them answered. "Good!" he replied. And he reached under the table and brought out a bucket of sand. He started dumping the sand in and it went into all the spaces left between the rocks and the gravel and filled the jar to the brim. Then he looked up at the class and asked, "What is the point of this illustration?"

One eager beaver raised his hand and said, "The point is, no matter how full your schedule is, if you try really hard, you can always fit some more things into it!" Unfortunately, that is the lesson that too many of us take from this illustration…that we can always “fit more in.” We cram our lives and the lives of our families with an onslaught of sports, school, tutors, trips, and enrichment classes, always hoping that if we shake the jar a little more, we can fit in a few more grains of sand. But the speaker replied, “That's not the point. The truth this illustration teaches us is: If you don't put the big rocks in first, you'll never get them in at all. You need to choose what the Big Rocks are in your life, or your days will simply fill up with sand."

Most of us spend hours every day shoveling sand, responding to things that are not connected to our deepest priorities. In his famous 1967 essay "The Tyranny of the Urgent," Charles Hummel makes the essential distinction between the urgent and the important. The urgent demands our time, but usually wastes it; the important redeems it, gives it eternal significance. Doing urgent things, he writes, takes from us our energy, peace, and joy; doing important things gives us fulfillment, significance, peace, joy.

We need to examine our schedules, because they reflect our values, demonstrate what are our rocks and what our sand. Rabbi David Saperstein often says that our federal budget is the great moral document of our time, because it reflects how our nation allocates its financial resources. If this is so, then our family calendars are the moral documents of our lives, because they expose, for better or worse, how we spend our time, that most precious natural resource. We may find that in our daily routines, we spend valuable time on things we don’t really value, time that we could use for something we value more.

My partner Topaz suggests that we could each have a “time garage sale.” Most of us only have a limited amount of storage space, so every few years we need to clear things out. With a “time garage sale,” we could each look at our routines and, instead of figuring out how we could cram something else in, decide what we could eliminate. Perhaps you decide that the stop that you make for coffee isn’t worth it. You’ve just gained 20 minutes of your life. People don’t usually have garage sales in order to make a hundred bucks—people have garage sales to unclutter their homes. In the same way, we should eliminate unimportant tasks and routines not for the sake of what we need those extra 20 minutes for, but simply for the sake of taking “time clutter” out of our lives.

More important that any change in behavior, though, is a change in mindset. We need to stop hurrying, to stop trying to catch up, to stop saying, “There just isn’t enough time.” There is enough time. As the line from the hit musical Rent reminds us, we have “Five hundred, twenty five thousand six hundred minutes in every year.” We have plenty of time. We have all the time that God gives us. Whether our time on this earth is short or long, we have it all, every minute of every day.

As we prepare ourselves for the Yom Kippur Yizkor service, we reflect on the uncertainty of the time we share together in this world. As Rabbi Milton Steinberg, whose life ended when he was only 47, wrote: “We cannot know what the quantity of our life will be, so we must deepen its quality. We must make up for the threatened brevity of life by heightening the intensity of our lives. We must treasure one another in the knowledge that we cannot know how long we shall have one another.”

I’d like to conclude by sharing the words of poet Michel Quoist, reminding each of us that God has given us plenty of time, all the years of our lives, to fill quietly, calmly, completely, up to the brim:

I went out, God,
People were coming and going, walking and running.
Everything was rushing: cars, trucks, the street, the whole town.
People were rushing not to waste time.

They were rushing after time.
To catch up with time, to gain time.
Good-bye sir, excuse me, I haven’t time.
I’ll come back, I can’t wait, I haven’t time.

I must end this letter – I haven’t time.
I’d love to help you, but I haven’t time.
I can’t accept, having no time.
I can’t think, I can’t read, I’m swamped, I haven’t time.

I’d like to pray, but I haven’t time.
You understand, God, they simply haven’t the time.
The child is playing, he hasn’t time right now … later on…
The young married has his house, he has to fix it up.  He hasn’t time … later on… 

And so all people run after time, God.
They pass through life running hurried, jostled, overburdened, frantic, and they never get there.
They still haven’t time.
In spite of all their efforts, they’re still short of time.

Of a great deal of time. 
God, You must have made a mistake in Your calculations.
The hours are too short, the days are too short, our lives are too short. 
You who are beyond time, God, You smile to see us fighting it.

And You know what You are doing.
You make no mistakes in Your distributions of time to people.
You give each one time to do what You want him to do.
But we must not deface time, waste time, kill time,

For time is not only a gift that You give us
But a perishable gift,
A gift that does not keep. 
God, I have time.

I have plenty of time,
All the time You gave me.
The years of my life,
The days of my years,
The hours of my days,
They are all mine,
Mine to fill quietly, calmly
But to fill completely, up to the brim.

SHABBAT SHALOM AND SHANA TOVA