L’Shana Tovah U’metukah

L’Shana Tovah U’metukah

Freeing Ourselves from the Burden of Time

Zach Benjamin | Chief Executive Officer, Jewish Long Beach

As we approach the High Holy Days, we find ourselves entering our annual season of reflection and introspection. Each year, we are called to earnestly examine our flaws and how they have impacted both our own lives and those of the people with whom we surround ourselves. During this month of celebration and solemnity, we also fulfill an imperative to make note, and perhaps some sense, of how the spaces and communities in which we live our lives have evolved over the course of the preceding year, as well as how we have contributed - for both good and ill - to that evolution.

We often equate this time of renewal with self-improvement and a recommitment to serving as a light unto our environment. However, we often tend to overlook the underlying concept that drives the principles and rituals of these most profound days on the Hebrew calendar: the passage of time.

While Rosh Hashanah marks the transition to a new year, which itself is a measure of time, we might interpret Yom Kippur as an opportunity to take inventory of our own emotional development over the timespan of our lives. Even Sukkot and Simchat Torah— signifying the harvest and the completion of the annual reading of the Torah, respectively— commemorate milestones of the calendar that remind us of where we stand in the annual cycle of Jewish life and learning.

Indeed, time is a purely human construct, created by our forebears as a means to explain that which is unexplainable. Creation, life, growth, aging, decline, and death form the very core of the human experience, and yet, depending on one’s religious orientation, we can turn only to G-d or humanity’s limited scientific capabilities to explain why and how these inevitable processes take place.

As humans, we seek order and take comfort in the predictable. We have created vast, complex mathematical and temporal systems by which we attempt to paint gridlines around nature’s unpredictability. We have attempted to wedge life’s amorphousness into a series of cycles, replete with milestones and signposts to help us keep track of our position within each.

Remove this imagined security blanket, and we are reminded of the fact that we live not in a predictable matrix of overlapping repetitive cycles, but rather in a persistent state of chaos. It is this aversion to the unexpected that lies at the heart of our collective distress during the twoand-a-half years of the pandemic.

In June of 2021, I wrote in this space about the sense of relief that accompanied what we hoped at the time would be the permanent ebb of COVID-19. Unfortunately, the euphoria was short-lived as, early that fall, the pandemic plunged us back into an indefinite state of isolation that would ultimately rob us of another full year of healthy human engagement and interaction.

We often equate this time of renewal with self-improvement and a recommitment to serving as a light unto our environment.

Many of us refer to the pandemic as “lost years.” We do so as a nod to the concept of time and the central role it plays in our perception that our world is either in order or in chaos. COVID interrupted our routines and uprooted the signposts upon which we so heavily rely to reassure us that we are safe in our cycles. Thus, our civilization experienced a perhaps unprecedented loss of our sense of place in time.

The early uncertainty, and perhaps even excitement, that characterized COVID’s rapid and dramatic redirection of our day-to-day routines gave way to a prevailing sense of distress, dread, and imprisonment. Days and then months began to bleed together as milestones that typically invited significant fanfare passed unmarked. Time and routine began to lose their definition as science and civic leadership remained short answers to the question of just how long humanity would endure this disruption.

Experiments conducted at universities in both the United States and the United Kingdom have demonstrated that losing one’s sense of time results in almost inevitable, catastrophic cognitive breakdown. Predictably, perhaps, the pandemic’s robbery of our routines appears to have caused a concerning recalibration of humanity’s social-emotional faculties that has taxed the limits of our capacity to manage life’s layered challenges, all of which were amplified against the backdrop of COVID-19.

As we reflect not only on the past year, but on the first quarter of this decade, we might now be able to do so with the benefit true hindsight, as the world appears to have finally learned how to live with COVID rather than to hide from it. While the lessons of the pandemic will continue to reveal themselves for years to come, we have learned much about our own nature, our vulnerabilities, and our remarkable ability to adapt. We have also gained valuable insight regarding the boundaries that we must set in order to prevent ourselves from being singed by the proverbial candle that we tend to burn from every conceivable wick.

Perhaps the most important lesson of the past two-plus years is that we are best served extracting ourselves from our obsession with the construct of time. Rather, we may be well advised to live each moment as uniquely as possible rather than viewing every experience within the context of a cycle or routine. While we must always plan for the future, we handicap ourselves when we become so fixated on the next milestone that we lose our focus on the present.

This High Holy Days, I hope that we resist the temptation to remain hostage to time, and rather that we allow ourselves to breathe, to be fully present in moments with those we care about most, and to give ourselves fully to our introspective meditations and reflections.

All of us at Jewish Long Beach and the Alpert JCC wish you and yours shana tovah u’metukah: a sweet, healthy, and joyful New Year.