It is time to reclaim timelessness, “foreverness,” the way we fit into eternity. But only the right kind.
The “right kind” is not new; and it takes two forms. Individually, eternity is some form of “moreness” in which we participate after we die; and, possibly, before we are born as well: an eternal soul, perhaps, that transcends our corporeal being and produces our deepest form of identity in this, our earthly state. There is also a corporate dimension, the way even our tiny lives contribute to a larger destiny for humanity – if not an actual eternity, at least an “almost” one, in that we see our impact joining that of others and stretching out at least as long as our planet survives (some 7-8 billion years or so).
Despite the impossibility of producing evidence one way or the other, we have believed in at least one of these two eternities for almost all of human history. Despite the same impossibility of producing evidence one way or the other, many people now disparage that belief – with terrible consequences. Among them is the urge to carve out ersatz experiences of eternity: oases of quietude or of hedonistic pleasure that deny reality round about them. Like William Wordsworth, “The world is too much with us.” By “getting and spending,” he added, “we lay waste our powers.”[i] Not so us. We conclude, falsely, that by “getting and spending,” we can escape the noise around us while the world goes away.
Alas, the world never does go away.
A case in point comes from Jenny Erpenbeck’s remarkable novel, Visitation. A woman moves into a spacious lakeside estate, what she calls her “piece of eternity.” In the perfection of being that followed, “her laughter was the laughter of today, of yesterday and just as much, the laughter of twenty years ago,” as if time were “at her beck and call, like a house in which she can enter now this room, now that.”
But the world intrudes. It is the early days of Nazi Germany; she must ignore the fact that the property has been “purchased” from Jewish owners who were forced to “sell” it. Then the war doesn’t go well, and the woman’s finances are drained. When the war finally ends and Soviet soldiers utterly ransack the place, the woman bemoans their “drilling a hole in her eternity.”[ii] Her remaining years are spent stranded in Communist East Germany. She is clearly on the wrong side of history.
Now let us extend the story. With her false eternity fading away, the woman discovers she will inevitably age, sicken, and disappear into the nothingness of death, that, for her (with no real eternity to draw upon) must be like the black hole of dying stars that suck up the light of the universe and never give it back.
“Mass,” say the physicists, is the amount of matter in an object, the extent of its resistance to being buffeted about by change. What if humans have not just physical mass, however, but moral mass as well, measurable by the extent to which we resist being thrown into dismay by the events of the moment? What if moral mass is augmented by imaginative mass, the capacity to think beyond the moment, to see ourselves as part of a larger cosmic plan where the “almost” eternity of history and the actual eternity of a soul are better measures of what matter?
We need not make do with counterfeit eternities and the knife wounds of history that perforate it. We can look to those real eternities of which we are a part. Eternity is not a carved-out part of life; life is a carved-out part of eternity.
I said that there is no real evidence of either eternity, but where there is no evidence, the Talmud suggests there may at least be intimations: finite intimations, that is, of infinite realities. Shabbat, for example, is an intimation of the world to come. Yom Kippur is shabbat shabbaton, “a sabbath of sabbaths” where the gates that open onto rebirth and a betterment of time never close.
So too we have humanity’s own intimations of timelessness: Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata for example. And nature’s own intimations too: a harvest moon; sunsets over the ocean; and stars – the endlessness of starry nights, stretching into vastness. Like ultra-rationalist Emanuel Kant, I too am filled with awe by “the starry heavens above and the moral law within.”
Medieval rabbis ascribe special necessity for congregations gathering on the High Holy Days not just to pray together but to pray out loud together so that “individuals may learn from one another.”[iii] What must they learn, if not the intimation that none of us need face the future alone? The High Holy Days also spotlight the absence of those who once sat beside us but are no more. I hear Kol Nidre and sing Avinu Malkenu in a room filled with people and a space that is resonant with those who once heard and sang as I still do, but who are gone. I am part of a generational chain, dedicated to the promise that goodness, sweetness, and kindness will prevail.
When artificial attempts at manufacturing eternity are hollowed out by the terrors of time, I remember that no amount of leakage can make actual eternity less than what it is. Take away a million, a billion, a trillion, from infinity, and you still have infinity. Bombard eternity with however many attacks on the human spirit, and you still have eternity. These days of anger, confusion, and fear, are real. But what keeps me going is the High Holy Day intimation that in my own little way I am part of something more capacious, part of two kinds of eternity that are just as real and maybe even more so.
[i] William Wordworth, sonnet, “The World is too much with us,” composed c.1802.
[ii] Jenny Erpenbeck, Visitation. Original German, Heimsuchung, 2008. English ed., Susan Bernofsky, trans., New York: New Directions Publishing Corp., 2010, pp. 52, p. 51, 54, 55.
[iii] See, e.g., Mateh Moshe, by Moses ben Abraham of. Przemyśl, 1591, Section 693.
Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, Ph.D. 