Clepsydra

Essay on the Plurality of Time in Judaism

Sylvie Anne Goldberg, Benjamin Ivry

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780804789059
• eBook ISBN: 9780804797160
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

The clepsydra is an ancient water clock and serves as the primary metaphor for this examination of Jewish conceptions of time from antiquity to the present. Just as the flow of water is subject to a number of variables such as temperature and pressure, water clocks mark a time that is shifting and relative. Time is not a uniform phenomenon. It is a social construct made of beliefs, scientific knowledge, and political experiment. It is also a story told by theologians, historians, philosophers, and astrophysicists.

Consequently, Clepsydra is a cultural history divided in two parts: narrated time and measured time, recounted time and counted time, absolute time and ordered time. It is through this dialog that Sylvie Anne Goldberg challenges the idea of a unified Judeo-Christian time and asks, "What is Jewish time?" She consults biblical and rabbinic sources and refers to medieval and modern texts to understand the different sorts of consciousness of time found in Judaism. In Jewish time, Goldberg argues, past, present, and future are intertwined and comprise one perpetual narrative.

Part I

Narrated Time

In the late twentieth century, assisted by digital watches and clocks, Westerners enjoyed a purely functional use of time, seen as a means of optimally quantifying and scheduling activities on a daily basis. This view of time, doubtless the most familiar because the most nonchalantly practiced, still prevails. For millennia, measuring time seemed to depend, not on mankind, but on the stars, before becoming for many centuries the privilege of the Church. If the fragmentation caused by temporality today seems a given, its source and determining have been relegated to unfathomed depths that science has yet to clarify. It is thus paradoxical that the more humans believe that time has been mastered, tamed, and integrated into our lives as a given, the more its direction seems vague. In traditional societies, the sacred dimension of time was taken for granted: its measure was neither precise nor a commonly known fact, or even seen as essential. Its origin, destiny, and recurrence were perhaps more consistently known. Ever since Einstein radically overturned the approach to time by breaking with the ancient idea of an absolute time, understanding has, however, depended on a range of methods and fields. Some temporal functionalists take refuge in books such as David Landes’s Revolution in Time (1983) and Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers’s Entre le temps et l’éternité (Between time and eternity; 1988), in writings by astrophysicists and biologists, or in appealing to earth scientists, archaeologists, palaeontologists, philosophers, theologians, and specialists in the philosophy of history. My approach is somewhere in the middle; it is neither strictly speaking history, since the terms of the historical contract are not always respected, nor philosophy. I would not dare try to develop a general review of time, and even less one of the philosophy of history!

Yet would it be sensible to seek to capture the relationship of the Jews with temporality without using philosophy; that is, by ignoring any progress in thinking about time? Is it possible to avoid taking into account the positioning that religions assign to the human sense of being in time? Are theological movements not markers that from the start express considerable changes? In a similar way, how to avoid analyzing the role played by the philosophy of history? Was it not the key driver of the first progress in the science of Judaism? Somewhere between the two, domains entrenched in the social sciences sail onward, hoping not to founder in a backwash of disorder, boredom, or drought.

The first section is intended to grasp the way in which the question of time is considered. No matter what questions researchers may have today, their ideas derive from knowledge stockpiled since the nineteenth century. In a certain way, understanding is insidiously guided by all the work done in the field. So an inquiry into perceptions and the use of time in a specific group related to a cognitive system preceding our own requires the deconstruction of the analysis grid that makes it intelligible to us today. The categories of thought in traditional Jewish societies appear obscure to us, as much due to the process of secularization that altered them as to changes in models of understanding the world.

The present work is primarily an essay; in this sense, it offers an occasion for thinking about what currently makes up the complexity of approaches to time and Judaism. Whether accepted or rejected, these approaches are shaped by a group of ideas belonging to the observant or secular Christian conceptual world, as well as to the Jewish conceptual world, adapted to its entry into the City [i.e., into the Western civilizational context in the wake of the Emancipation]. Let there be no mistake about my approach. No nostalgia for Atlantis should be sought in it; it is simply the report of a researcher working on a social world vanished barely a century or two ago, whose sources, to be intelligible to current generations, require a learning process akin to palaeography in the study of the Sumerian world.

This first section is oriented by two major debates. The first philosophizes in pursuit of the preliminary Aristotelian question: “What is time?” Long seen as masters of thinking about time, philosophers devised varied approaches to this, with the help of which I shall try to explain the positions of Jewish thinkers. The other debate, in tandem with theology and the philosophy of history, asks: “What is Jewish time?” Both draw a distinction between Greek (Indo-European) and Hebrew temporalities based on ideas of cycle and linearity. The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns is surely just a step away from debates about the Greeks, which we shall try to span by using our own instruments. Starting with the Western convention that there is such a thing as “universal” time, we’ll investigate its meaning. Readers who don’t jump ship during the crossing are invited on an excursion around several questions, commonplace to all comers: Is time really the same for everyone? How should temporality be approached? What are the historian’s tools in this realm? In thinking about time in the Jewish world, what do we seek to deal with exactly? Representations, to be sure, but of what? Might it involve calendrical rhythms? Social otherness? Religious differentiation? History or events? Or, for that matter, ideas that the Jews have developed over the centuries about their past, present, and future?

One

Ad tempus universale . . . A Time for Everyone?

Whether we intend the idea of “universal time” as a commonly accepted principle for perceiving time or an arbitrary convention, different conclusions will be drawn about its meaning. In the first case, it would be difficult to sidestep the pitfall of making the history of time into a historical tale as a rough outline of the progress of Western history. By relegating ancient epochs to before the year 1, which divides time into a series of eras, cycles, and scansions determined by reigns and genealogies, we implicitly follow a kind of theological evolutionism, conceived as the feeling of being able to control temporality in some form. After dating became a social marker, the measurement of time had the upper hand. By contrast, the second case opens perceptions to the whims of arbitrariness. From this one may, as the historian Daniel Shabetaï Milo expects us to, merrily blow away the centuries, shake up chronologies, and reflect analyses and historical tales pertaining to unconstrained contradiction.¹ Both perspectives seem critically to lack efficacy for building time in traditional Jewish society.

How do we advance to an outline of building universal time in contemporary efforts? Citing Plato and Aristotle, the Polish historian and philosopher Krzysztof Pomian sketches his thoughts about what he calls “time visible and invisible.”² He starts from the idea formulated by Plato that “time is born with the Heavens, so that born together, they also dissolve together . . . the Sun, Moon, and Five other stars . . . are born to define the numbers of Time,” representing night, day, the lunar month, and the year.³ Time imitates eternity even though the immutability of the invisible world makes the creation of the visible into an act located outside time: “days and nights, months and seasons existed not at all before the birth of heaven . . . for . . . these are divisions of Time.”⁴ To back his formulation of the research question, Pomian quotes three main objections by Aristotle, which distinguish between circular movement and time, as well as between change and movement. The objections conclude that time is in the instant, in the thing that changes. Change is linked to the visible object, whereas time is universal. Without any ties to the visible, “it is simultaneously the same everywhere.”⁵ Controlled in this manner, the inverse of the Platonic model of creation, the Aristotelian world, is in fact intemporal: “Its total duration had no beginning and will have no end; on the contrary, it contains and embraces in itself the infinity of time.”⁶ For Pomian, this says it all. What Aristotle advances as problematic about time will remain so until the arrival of relativity in the twentieth century: “An invisible twin of movement that affects them, it was deemed a metaphysical intrusion into the heart . . . of the physical world.”⁷ According to Aristotle, movement is what defines the passage of the instant between the before and the after, what happened in the instant preceding what would happen, which only the soul can detect. Aristotelian time is only perceptible due to the invention of the idea of physical movement, which in turn demands to be associated with intelligence and soul: “Because instants are in time, likewise the before and the after are in time, for where the instant is, the dislocation from the instant is also found,”⁸ which takes into account the simultaneity of the confrontation of the moving body and the soul. Aristotelian time, captured between movement and instant, multiplicity and universality, qualitative and number, illustrates unity, identity, universality, and uniformity; by extending the notion of the eternal movement of the First Cause, it might be referred to the idea, however separate from the eternal life of God.

Yet for people, time is destructive and irreversible, just as “it also applies to other things that possess [within them] natural flow, creation, and destruction.”⁹ Pomian conceptualizes Aristotelian time by blending it with chronosophy, psychological or lived time which is short, linear, regressive, and irreversible; cosmic, solar time whose last trace is found in daily life, is indefinitely long and cyclic, for which a return is reserved only for certain species; and religious time, that of eternity, unchanging and stationary. The underlying question of the imitatio dei (imitation of God) slips between changing time and eternity, which Pomian classes respectively as psychological and religious time. For the Stoics, cosmic time is divine; humanity should contemplate and strive to conform to it. Time is endowed with a religious dimension, which inevitably subsumes the time of a sage who knows how to live in harmony with nature. If Plotinus breaks with this approach by refusing primacy or independent reality to cosmic time, it is the better to formulate his vision of links existing between eternity and time. Since as a totality never to be completed, eternity is perceived as consubstantial with the reality of God, for which there can be neither past nor future, it is identical to itself in its unchanging perfection. In Plotinus, meditation is the means by which the soul relates to eternity.¹⁰ Plotinus thus accords preeminence to religious time, leaving no room for cosmic time, it being recognized that the visible, apparent measure of time established by the celestial revolution is nevertheless only the soul’s time, preceding the time that engenders and activates it. In this depiction of eternity, Pomian notes an integration in magic and religion that makes time “congenitally incomplete, always in need, refusing to be grasped in its entirety, which has no point of life; the present falls into the past, into nonbeing, where the future still abides.”¹¹ Pomian thus relies on Aristotle here, who asks how best to classify time, whether among beings or nonbeings.

Based on the schism introduced by Plotinus, perhaps influenced by gnosticism, cosmic time is relieved of the sense of mediation between eternity and psychological time. This is particularly the case for Christians, who see time as the expression of God’s will. Every event is presently responsible for the totality of a destiny (devenir) that in essence contains past, present, and future. History may thus be conceived of as a divine design, of which the Incarnation is the central point, around which everything is organized and explained. In other words, only the mediation of the Christian approach makes possible the concordance of archaic and modern ideas that superimposes the conventional concept of a time underpinned by a history irreversibly progressing toward universality upon the ancient, pagan, and Greek.

In Categories of Medieval Culture, Aron Gurevich devotes a whole chapter to showing that time and space are the crucial parameters of life and human experience.¹² However, time is not meant here as duration, an irreversible sequence of the flow of events, and time and space are objective data whose qualities are separate from content. Gurevich also reminds the reader that time and space are categories that cannot apply identically to nature and society: “Few factors in a culture express the essential nature of its world picture so clearly as its way of reckoning time: for this has a determining influence on the way people behave, the way they think, the rhythm of their lives and the relationships between them and things. . . . The comparison [of ancient Eastern and classical societies with the apocalyptic conception of the world’s evolution from creation to destruction] underlines the importance of making a thorough study of the problem of time in the historico-cultural place; but it does nothing to help us to understand the category of time as apprehended by medieval man.”¹³

Gurevich rightly notes that Judeo-Christian civilization was not the only influence on the categories of medieval consciousness, and his history of approaches to time includes the agrarian society of the ancient barbarians. Its pattern formed by nature, the farming calendar in an agrarian society reflected the changing of the seasons and the succession of agricultural tasks. In Scandinavia, summer was designated as the time “between ploughing and stacking,” May was dubbed the “time for gathering eggs” and the “time when sheep and calves are rounded up.” For Germanic tribes, July was the “month of mowing.” June was for setting aside a “month of fallow,” and September the “month of sowing.”¹⁴ The years and time in general constitute a circular movement, signaling periodic repetition, rather than being directionless slots devoid of content. Governed by the cycles of nature, time in agrarian society both shapes the mutual interdependence of humanity and structures the subjugation of human consciousness to it. Far from being change, in this case, movement is repetition, and only acts repeated at intervals, as sanctioned by tradition, are d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments from the French Edition
• Preface
• Scriptural Abbreviations Cited
• Introduction
• Part I: Narrated Time
• Part II: Time Counted Down, or the World order
• Afterword to the English Translation
• Appendix
• Approximate Chronology
• The Alphabet and Numerical Values of Letters
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index