Sacred Memory and Sacred Time

Time, as Abraham Joshua Heschel never tired of saying, is only the mask of eternity. To God, who remembers and foresees all, memory and foresight are the same; for God to see the future is the same as for him to remember his own plan of salvation.

Each year as the Assembly of Israel prepares to stand before God to seek atonement for our sins, our liturgy, composed in Second Temple times and formalized in late antiquity in the Babylonian Talmud wears a deeper impression on my mind. One does not learn the liturgy so much as remember it, and with remembrance, enters into a different dimension of time. If Jews are offered a foretaste of the World to Come on each Sabbath, on the Day of Atonement they are uplifted into a moment of redemption. Paradoxically this occurs through remembrance, just as the liturgy teaches us.

As Franz Rosenzweig wrote (my translation),

Thus the Days of Awe, New Year’s Day and the Day of Astonement, place eternal redemption in the midst of time . . . the Judgment that otherwise is displaced to the End Times is now set into the present moment. It cannot be the world that is judged—where would it be in this moment? Instead, it is the individual that is judged. . . .

[. . . ]

Thus the year becomes in the most complete way a placeholder for eternity. In the yearly recurrence of this “last” judgment, eternity is freed from every sense of belong to the distant Beyond; it is actually there in the here and now, graspable by and comprensible to the individual, and taking hold and grabbing the individual in turn with a strong hand. The Day no longer pertains to the history of the Eternal People, nor to the eternally changeable history of the world. There is no more waiting, no more burrowing into a hole in history.

Many Jewish commentators take note of the recurrent theme of Creation-Revelation-Redemption in Jewish liturgy and thinking, most recently Rabbi Lord Sacks in his lucid introduction to the prayer book he edited (reviewed by Rabbi Yoel Finkelman in the new issue of First Things). As Rabbi Sacks observes, this triad—elaborated by Franz Rosenzweig in The Star of Redemption—peeks through the structure of Jewish prayer, notably our foundational prayer, the Eighteen Benedictions. Alan Mintz observes the same structure in the three blessings that accompany the Shma, the foundational statement, “Listen, Israel!”

The supplemental (or musaf) service for the New Year, which is of great antiquity and took its present form no later than the ninth century, also takes a three-fold form:

Kingship (Malkhuyot), Remembrance (Zichronot), and Shofar Blasts (Shofarot). That this structure corresponds in a way to the classical triad of Creation, Revelation, and Redemption is frequently observed. But what does this imply? Two very different kinds of memory are at work, namely our memory of God and God’s memory of us. For us to remember God is to be worthy of redemption; for God to remember us is to redeem us.

God’s remembrance also is intervention, for past and future have no meaning within God’s time. As we begin the remembrance service, we pray (Hertz Siddur):

Thou rememberest what was wrought from eternity and art mindful of all that hath been formed from of old; before thee all secrets are revealed, and the multitude of hidden things since the creation; for there is no forgetfulness before the throne of thy glory, nor is there ought hidden from thy eyes. Though rememberest every deed that hath been done; not a creature is concealed from thee; all things are manifest and known unto thee, O Lord our God, who lookest and seest to the end of all the ages. For thou wilt bring on the appointed time of remembrance for the judgment of every spirit and soul, and the memory of many actions, and the multitude of hidden things without number. From the beginning thou didst make this thy purpose known, and from aforetime thou didst disclose it. This day, on which was the beginning of thy work, is a remembrance of the first day, for it is a statute for Israel, a decree of the God of Jacob.

Because Rosh HaShanah is the first day, it is also the day of judgment:

Thereon also sentence is pronounced upon countries—which of them is destined to the sword and which to peace, which to famine and which to plenty; and each separate creature is judged thereon, and recorded for life or for death. Who is not judged on this day? For the remembrance of every creature cometh before thee.

Time is the mask of eternity: Creation is also the Eschaton, and remembrance is judgment, whether redemption or condemnation. The final section of the service, Shofar blasts, links revelation—the shofar which Israel heard as it assembled before Mount Sinai—with the shofar that will call the exiles of Israel to joyous return:

All ye inhabitants of the world, and ye dwellers on the earth, when an ensign is lifted up on the mountains, see ye, and when the Shofar is blown, hear ye. And it is said, And it shall come to pass on that day, that a great Shofar shall be blown; and they that were dispersed in the land of Egypt; and they shall worship the Lord in the holy mountain at Jerusalem. . . . Our God and God of our fathers, sound the Great Shofar for our freedom, lift up the ensign to gather our exiles, bring our scattered ones from the ends of the earth.

We remember God through the shofar blasts that summon the congregation of Israel to attention at our festival, and God’s remembrance of us is our redemption. In our blessing for each Sabbath we recall that the seventh day “is a memorial of creation—that day being also the first of the holy convocations in remembrance of the departure from Egypt.” The difference in the Days of Awe is that God remembers us for judgment.

(As an aside: It occurs to me that nothing is more alien to Jewish thought than Kant’s assumption that time (like space) is a category of perception hard-wired into our brains, or Aristotle’s view of time as an indifferent succession of moments. Because it is our time, the time of our lives and the time of God’s salvation, nothing is less self-evident and more illusory than time. Biblical-rabbinic thought cannot agree with the mainstream of Greek-derived philosophy even on the most elementary issues of perception. There may be some common ground on the matter of time with St. Augustine; my study of sacred music and sacred time will appear in the next issue of First Things with extensive reference to Augustine’s theory of time.)

Each year a little more of the consequence of the Day of Atonement, and each year I wait for sunset with a bit more fear and more pronounced trembling. God remembers.

To all Jewish readers, g’mar chatimah tovah, and an easy fast.