All in Good Time

Dear BMC Family, 

So often we think and speak about time. What is our attitude, our relationship with time as Jewish people? We receive a bit of insight in this week’s parasha, Emor. 

Within it we receive ‘The Callings of Holiness’, a list of the festivals in the Jewish calendar. It’s a syllabus for how we are to organize our time, when we turn towards each other, and when we turn inwardly. Rabbi Amy Wallk Katz adds “In Judaism, time brings focus, structure and meaning to our weeks (Shabbat), our years (Passover, Shavuot, Sukkot) and our lives (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur).” And the structure of our days is established by traditional prayer times and blessings.

And yet, how many time management structures have we tried to implement in vain? How frazzled have we gotten? How do we improve our relationship with time, and what does it mean to manage it?

Rabbi Peter H. Schweitzer adds:

“Once we marked time by the stars and the moon and became expert observers of the skies. But we had a problem when the lunar year lagged behind the solar year and the holidays threatened to rotate untethered away from their seasons. So we developed a sophisticated calendar that periodically adjusts lunar and solar timetables with our own Jewish version of a leap year. This system gave rise to another quality of our relationship with time: flexibility. Some years, we say, the Jewish holidays are early; some years they are late. But one thing they are not is on time. And so we have to adjust ourselves constantly to this slippery timetable.”

This week may we learn to be more flexible, as life’s challenges and gifts inevitably arrive too early, or too late.

Continuing to wish you safety and health, and sending a רְפוּאָה שְׁלֵמָה (r’fuah shlema, full recovery) to anyone currently in need.

For those in our community who have experienced loss at this time, 

המקום ינחם אתכם בתוך שאר אבלי ציון וירושלים

Hamakom yenakhem etekhem betokh shaar avelay tziyon viyrushalayim.

May Hashem comfort you among the rest of the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.

Shabbat Shalom, 

BMC Team