It’s About Time We Learn
This week, I finally learned what the Y2K bug a quarter of a century ago was all about. I was only thirteen at the time, and not particularly savvy with computers, and by the time I would have understood what the problem was, it had been long-resolved.
As I now know, the issue was that computer programs represented years with only two digits, as in “98” or “99”. The approach of the year 2000 was going to scramble all of the data because entering a new century (and millennium!) required more digits than programs were equipped to process.
Behind the technical problem, though, was a human conceptual problem, an error of chronocentrism. A quarter of a century before Y2K , the sociologist Jib Fowles described chronocentrism as “the belief that one’s own times are paramount, that other periods pale in comparison.” Early computer programmers seem simply to have thought the 1800s and the 2000s were too distant in time to be relevant.
There are some who think even four digits aren’t sufficient for the time horizon we should be imagining. The Long Now Foundation proposes we display years with a zero in front, and think of the next 10,000 years of human life as we collectively make decisions. In the year 02013, they shared: “Our zero is for optimism. The notion that the externalized thoughts we write today may survive myriad years to a time when that fifth digit becomes significant…”
Of course, Jewish time extends backward before the Gregorian year 0 (00000?). I often think of Torah study with its myriad commentaries as a form of time travel, hopping from Spain in the 1200s CE (Maimonides) to France in the 1000s CE (Rashi) all the way back to Canaan c.1200 BCE (Moses in the wilderness) and then dizzyingly forward to 1800s Lithuania (the Netziv) before returning to the present moment with a new insight from Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum. Torah is an effective antidote to chronocentrism.
One Jewish instinct is to collapse time into living memory, such that on Passover we can “view ourselves as having personally left Egypt” (Mishnah Pesachim 10:5, c. 200 CE).
But I find just as often that the great events of Jewish history enter the collective bloodstream like a delayed-release medicinal capsule. The experience happens, but only much later do we gradually figure out how to understand its meaning and lessons. There’s an odd disconnect between direct experience and clear understanding.
In this week’s Torah portion, Ki Tavo, we find just such a situation (Devarim 29:1-3):
Moses called all Israel and said to them: You have seen all that God did before your very eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his courtiers and to his whole country: the wondrous feats that you saw with your own eyes, those prodigious signs and marvels. Yet until this day God has not given you a mind to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear.
Ironically, although we are supposed to imagine ourselves as experiencing leaving Egypt, even the generation or two that actually left Egypt didn’t quite understand the experience as they were having it. Only after forty years in the wilderness did they finally begin to understand.
Rabbeinu Bachya (1255–1340 Spain) suggests from here we learn that “ a student does not truly appreciate the opinions and knowledge of their teacher until they reach the age of 40.” True learning unavoidably takes time to metabolize.
Sforno (1500s Italy) adds an additional key to how we allow understanding to emerge over time: “Now that you have seen rov chasadav, a multitude of God’s kindnesses for you… the time has come that you will finally possess a knowing heart.”
For the Israelites, even the singular peak experience of hearing God’s own voice at Mt. Sinai could not produce in them a knowing heart. Only the pitter-patter of repeated acts of kindness over decades allowed them finally to see their own story clearly.
When you think about the significant events in your life, how do you understand them? Has your understanding shifted when you revisit the meaning of those events after years or decades? What old insights start to feel off-base? What new insights emerge? How will you tell your story this year?
On this full moon of Elul, may you take in the vastness of the tides of time. And while I’m not certain how our Jewish community, or our fellow Americans, or our whole human species will ever gain a shared understanding of reality, I do know we can always add our own acts of chesed, kindness that opens eyes and ears and hearts.
Shabbat shalom!
Rabbi Jay Levine
