Jewish Time

Passover, freedom holiday

By Prof. Rachel Elior
Hebrew University, Jerusalem

The word time (זמן, zman) does not appear in the Pentateuch, for time is an intangible, non-specific concept, while the Pentateuch expresses a worldview in which time consolidates a distinctive identity and relates to a richly meaningful historical moment that has to do with divine revelation and with the passage from slavery to freedom. The ancient Hebrew word that designates a concept of time is the word מועד, mo‘ed [which denotes a “set time”, and, through the other Hebrew words built from the letters of its root, עד, ‘ed, connotes witnessing, attesting, communing, meeting (Tr.)], which relates to a sanctified time that originates in a command from heaven addressed to the community (עדה, ‘edah) and a public that testifies or attests (מעידה, m‘eidah) about or to this command in the cycle of its life. Jewish time begins in the book of Exodus, with the exodus from Egypt, the book in which the word people, or nation (עם), is used for the first time in relation to the Children of Israel. That is to say, the month in which the end of servitude occurs, the month in which liberty begins with the exodus from Egypt, is the moment when Jewish time, as historical time, begins.

In the book of Exodus, in chapter 12, verse 2, it is written: “This month is for you the head of the months – the first, for you, of the months of the year”. And in chapter 13, verse 4, it is written: “Today you set forth, in the month of Spring [אביב, aviv]”. The first month of the year in the biblical Jewish calendar is Nissan – the month also called Aviv, Spring, when the exodus from Egypt took place, and according to the ancient Jewish calendar this is the month with which the year begins, and the month in which the world was created, since it is the month that marks the decisive passage from servitude to liberty. In order to remember this passage, the essence of which is the exchanging of human servitude for a divine promise of liberty, or the exchanging of a life in which there is no sovereignty over time for a life in which there is a sanctified regular cyclicality of work and cessation from work, the Torah commands an oath of liberty [in Hebrew the words oath, שבועה, shvu’ah, seven, שבע, shev’a, and Sabbath, שבת, shabbat, are interconnected; the word for oath, shvu’ah, is related to the septadic cyclicality of set times of liberty; the word Sabbath comes from the root of the verb that means to cease from work] and cycles of time that regulate cessation from work, in a septadic sequence, and are called “set times of JHWH holy convocations” ( מועדי ה' מקראי קודש , mo’adei hashem mikraei kodesh).

Jewish time is divided into septads that eternalize cessation from servitude, in a septadic cyclicality within the year as well as a septadic cyclicality across the years. The year is divided by Sabbaths every seven days, and by seven set times of JHWH in the first seven months of the year (Leviticus 23.1-44), while historical multi-ennial time is divided by fallow shmitah years every seven years (Deuteronomy 15) and jubilees every seven septads (7x7 = 49) of years (Leviticus 25.1-14). Each of these cycles of time expresses a cessation from creative activity and an eschewal of servitude to work and of making profits, in the name of the idea of liberty and equality. The Sabbath, which is defined as “a sabbatical Sabbath, a holy convocation, no work shall you do” (Leviticus 23.3) is the basis of Jewish time, for it is a septadic unit of time that depends on a divine command, on numbering, on counting and on testifying. It is not visible, nor is it necessitated by natural processes; it exists only when heard of, and it exists since the time when it was written in a book, testifying to a memory and a covenant, since the time there has existed a continuing counting of septads of days that has been preserved and observed by a community that remembers. According to the ancient calendar that was found among the scrolls from the Judean desert, which were written by the Zadokite priests during the last centuries before the Common Era, the seven “set times of JHWH holy convocations”, when all work is prohibited, are as follows: Passover on the fourteenth day of the first month; the Feast of Unleavened Bread that begins on the fifteenth day of the first month and goes on for seven days; the Day of the Waving of the Omer, which falls on the first First Day [i.e., Sunday] after the Feast of Unleavened Bread, on the twenty-sixth day of the first month; the Feast of Weeks which is also the Feast of the First Fruits, begins on the First Day seven Sabbaths later, in the middle of the third month, on the 15th of Sivan. In the seventh month, on the 1st of the month is the Sabbatical of Remembrance of the Trumpet-Blast; on the 10th day of the seventh month is the Day of Atonement, and on the 15th day of the same month is the Feast of Tabernacles that is another seven-day feast.

The seven “set times” just named occur in the first seven months of the year, between the first month, Nissan, and the seventh month, Tishrei. In the ancient calendar that is outlined in diverse scrolls found in the Judean desert – in the book of Enoch, the book of Jubilees, the Psalms Scroll, the polemical document Miqsat Maasei Torah, the book of Noah and the Songs of the Sabbath Offering – each year contained a fixed number of 364 days, and 52 Sabbaths (364:7 = 52), on set dates. All the “set time” days included in the seven “set times of JHWH” listed above come to 18 days in all (not counting the Sabbaths). Adding these 18 “set time” days to the 52 Sabbaths in the year, gives a result of seventy days. The seven-branched candelabrum (menorah) was a perceptible holy remembrance of this septadic order, with its annual, set-time, and weekly cycles.

The Jewish people was the only people in antiquity that had seventy days of liberty every year, for on the days of the “set times of JHWH / holy convocations” any kind of work was prohibited to all. This septadic cyclicality was continued in the cycles of fallow and jubilee years every seven and seven times seven years, and in each of these septadic cycles the eschewal of human sovereignty in favor of ideas of equality and liberty increased.

The Feast of Passover, which is also the Feast of Liberty, is a feast of passages, a celebration of a conclusion and a celebration of a beginning. Belu-Simion Fainaru’s works engage with several aspects of these passages. The work The Hebrews depicts the passage through the water, from the land of bondage to the land of liberty, from a known, harsh, subjugating reality, from which they are trying to flee, to an unfamiliar reality with its promise of liberty and its wondering about the unknown. The essence of servitude and the essence of liberty are connected with sovereignty over time: a slave is someone who is not master of his time, and all his time is subject to the arbitrary will of another, and is bound to the latter’s needs and welfare. A free man is someone whose time is his own, to divide as he sees fit, for his own needs and welfare and for the needs and welfare of others, by his own will and his own choice. Jewish time, as expressed in antiquity, sought to make sure that every person, without any limiting condition, would be assured one day of equality and liberty every seven days, and that each person would have seventy days of liberty and cessation of work every year. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this idea, for in antiquity large portions of the population lived in servitude without any liberty, working all year long without a feast day or a Sabbath or any right to cease work and to rest.

The passage through the water, which has to do with the crossing of the Red Sea, “in the sea on dry land” (Exodus 14.22), may be interpreted in many ways, but in each of these ways, what takes place here first of all is a passage (מעבר, ma‘avar). The work’s title, The Hebrews (העבריים, ha‘ivriim) is connected with the source of the ancient name, Across/ Past/ On-the-Other-Side-of (מעבר, me‘ever) the River (Joshua 234.3; 2 Samuel 16), which is to say that “The Hebrews” is not only the name of a language or a people who speaks that language, but also means “the People Who Crossed The River”, and refers to a group that passes from one place to another, a group that has left one known, familiar world, and has passed to an unknown world empowered by a divine promise, or, pushed by servitude and oppression to take its fate in its own hands, has got up and gone to the unknown, has crossed the sea, has passed from the familiar to the unexplored.

The work titled Belongs Nowhere and to Another Time expresses the consciousness of the uprooted, the fleeing, who do not belong to any place or time. Such was the condition of the Children of Israel who left the known and familiar regions of servitude and went to the unknown space that is called a desert. For forty years they wandered without a home, without an address, without any knowledge about the place they were going to, carrying with them a memory of the “house of bondage” of their slavery, and the hope of liberty, for a home in the still unknown promised land. The work Two People and a Home expresses the loss of a home that is experienced by the uprooted and the fleeing, and the hope for a home in the promised land, a hope that was not realized by those who came out of Egypt because, as we know, the generation of the wilderness, in whom slavery was ingrained, did not attain to enter this land. In their body and their spirit, this generation bore the memory of their previous home in the “house of bondage” and the hope of the longed-for home in the land of the free. They fled from the one and did not arrive at the other, which they sustained only in the eyes of their spirit. The work Woman with a Home, too, belongs to the world of images of rest and settling, of a home and intimacy, as in the saying of the Sages, “his wife is his home”, but it can also be interpreted as a woman who longs for a home, one of the sixty myriads who came out of Egypt and wandered until they died in the desert, losing all they had except the nostalgia for a home they had left and the yearning for a home they had not yet known.

The only thing that the offspring of the generation that came out of Egypt brought with them to the promised land was a written law, and a memory of a divine revelation that demands recognition of a single God, creator of heaven and earth, the God of history and of time, the God of the story and of the book, of the testimony (העדות, ha‘edut) and of the “set time” (מועד, mo‘ed), which stabilizes memory in the context of the verse “These are the set times of JHWH holy convocations that you shall convoke at their set time”, which replaces the memory of the culture from which they were uprooted. Holiness (קדושה, kedushah) and the holy (קודש, kodesh), in the Pentateuch, refer to time (זמן), not to place (מקום), to a set time (מועד), not a land (ארץ), to the abstract memory of liberty, not to the concrete reality which is always subject to the danger of servitude. The scriptural God is a God who rejects servitude and sanctifies (makes holy, מקדש, mekadesh) liberty, and demands the sanctification of time in an eternal septadic cyclicality in order to promise liberty to all, but does not sanctify the place. (The expression “holy land” is a late invention, while “set times of JHWH holy convocations” or “Remember the Sabbath day to sanctify it” are fundamental to the most ancient Jewish thought.)

The desert generation, who lost any hold on a place, obtained an entirely new perception of time. It is an illuminating fact that the Jewish people, which over and over again has experienced exile and deportation, uprooting and persecution, all of which involve loss of a living connection to a place, has – through all its wanderings and transformations – preserved its profound connection with Jewish time, time that involves memory, as in “Remember this day on which you got out of Egypt out of the house of bondage” (Exodus 13.3). The written memory, which informs the Jewish calendar, begins with the story of the Creation, which establishes the Jewish time unit – six days of doing [making, working] and a seventh day, a Sabbath, a day of cessation from work, a day of freedom. In the micrographic work In the Beginning, in which the first “portion” of the book of Genesis is painted on an egg, the artist connects with the beginning of the written Jewish memory, a memory that secures, makes sure, the oath of liberty that starts with the story of the Seven Days of Creation, as well as continued septadic rebirth in every generation.

Back to the top