When I was nine years old, I experienced my first existential crisis. It happened while I was waiting outside the gate of the outdoor swimming pool behind our apartment building. Having spent the previous eight years of my life in a home that was a short walk to the beach, I had developed a passion for the sea. My definition of pain at that time was being forced to wait a full hour after eating before being able to go back into the water -- a rule my father was unyielding about despite my many pleadings and hysterics. Our move from what was then the aesthetic paradise of Tangier, Morocco to the concrete wasteland of our Toronto suburb was a shock to my system, the reverberations of which I'm still feeling. But like all children, I was blessed with that most priceless gift of making the best of what I had when I had no choice, and before long our swimming pool became my new Mediterranean sea.

My favorite activity was diving into the cold water and then throwing my shivering body onto the hot concrete surrounding the pool to dry in the sun until I was hot enough to dive in again. In this cycle of delicious pleasure I spent many happy summer days.

On one particular sunny morning, the lifeguard opened the gate to the swimming pool but I did not dart in immediately after him as was my usual custom. Instead, I stood there watching as the pool filled up with joyful, laughing people while I became absorbed in my thoughts which, translated into adult language, went something like this: "These people are all deluded. Don't they realize that none of this is real? They are enjoying themselves now but at the end of the day it will all be over and at the end of many days like this one, they will all be dead and not a trace of them, or the moments they spent here, will remain. Each second, once it's over, also vanishes into nothingness like a little death. Once it's gone it's as if it never happened, so in the end, what difference does it make whether or not we enjoy ourselves? Anything that isn't permanent isn't real anyway."

I did not go into the pool that day. My biggest pleasure in life had suddenly lost its appeal.

Since the day I had discovered the horrible truth that I was not immortal, time had become my enemy.

In case you might be thinking that I was a child easily given over to morbid thoughts, nothing could be further from the truth. I was an extremely happy, fun-loving child, but I began to ask big questions at a very young age. It had all started a couple of years earlier in Tangier when I overheard my older sister speaking to her friend about her dead turtle. I asked my sister what the word "dead" meant. I had never heard that word before. Since we didn't have a television at home, I was not exposed to the many images of people dying that most children are used to seeing, so I knew nothing of the concept of death.

"It's when someone stops living" she explained.

At first it didn't sink in. How was it possible that someone could just stop living? It didn't make any sense to me. In my child's mind I assumed I would live forever. As my sister proceeded to explain, I felt that a weight heavier than I could bear had just fallen on top of me. That night I lay in bed trying to imagine what it would feel like to be dead. All I could picture was a terrifying black nothingness which I could not accept as being the end of my beautiful, charmed existence. After that, my father had to spend many long nights patiently trying to answer all my questions about death, and comforting me until I was able to fall asleep.

I soon pushed these distressing thoughts to the back of my mind, went back to the pool and eventually became a typical teenage zombie going through the motions of life with a vague feeling that nothing I did or said really mattered in the end. Since the day I had discovered the horrible truth that I was not immortal, time had become my enemy. I viewed him as a cruel tyrant who placates his victims with fleeting moments of pleasure, like a prison guard offering an inmate his last wish before the execution. When I got to high school, most of the material we were reading seemed to endorse my feelings of futility and purposelessness. One day my best friend and I wrote a funny rhyming poem in English class which started with the line: "Life is meaningless, so they say, in English 53A."

ATTAINING PERMANENCE

It wasn't until the age of 25, when I started studying the Torah that I began to realize that my childhood perceptions that day at the pool had been mistaken. Although I still believe I was correct in my premise that anything that isn't permanent is an illusion, I understand now that I was incorrect in my belief that a moment in time cannot become permanent. I was amazed to learn that human beings are able to eternalize moments in time through the performance of mitzvot (commandments), since each time we perform a mitzvah we attach ourselves to God and share in His eternity.

Rabbi Dr. Akiva Tatz points out that the root of the word mitzvah means "together," implying the idea of partnership. When we perform a mitzvah we form a partnership with the One who requested the mitzvah. He desires a certain result and asks us to perform the action which will bring about that result in this world. He is the beginning of the process and we are its completion. In this way we act as partners. ¹ Hence a mitzvah becomes the channel that enables a finite human being to connect to the infinite and eternal Source.

A mitzvah belongs to the world of eternity.

By connecting to God through the performance of a mitzvah, we can also eternalize the moments in time in which that mitzvah was performed. Those special moments when we light Shabbat candles, put on tefillin, perform acts of kindness, or carry out any other mitzvah, continue to live on forever. The Maharal of Prague, the 16th century mystic, explains that a mitzvah belongs to the world of eternity rather than the temporal world in which we live, so that when we perform a mitzvah we leave the world of time and enter into a world beyond time. The Torah tells us that near the end of his life, "Abraham was old; he came with his days."² One of the implications of this verse is that Abraham was ready to enter the next world accompanied by all the days of his life. Since he had actualized the potential of each day through his unwavering devotion to God, now that he was about to enter the world of eternity, his days as well as his soul would continue to live on forever.

The Jewish calendar is replete with opportunities for the sanctification of time through the Sabbath and the many Holidays. In fact, the blessing which we recite during the festivals states: Blessed are You, God, Who sanctifies Israel and the times." Implied in the wording of this blessing is the idea that God sanctifies time through Israel. Before the Jews left Egypt, they were given the mitzvah of sanctifying the new moon. The Sanhedrin (Jewish high court) would determine the beginning of the month on the basis of the testimony of the first two Jewish witnesses who observed the appearance of the new moon. This enabled the Jewish people to establish when each month began, and by extension, the days on which the Holidays would fall. The Talmud goes as far as to claim that the heavenly beit din (court) does not begin to sit in judgment for Rosh Hashana until Israel has pronounced the date of the new month.³

How is it possible that God gave the Jewish people the power to decide the timing of the most critical of Holidays, including Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana, the day on which every person and nation in the world is judged? What if we got it wrong? After all, it was quite possible that the new moon would not be sighted on time or that the witnesses might make a mistake. Yet the testimony of the witnesses invariably determined the beginning of the month, regardless of how timely or accurate their sighting actually was. The factual appearance of the new moon was irrelevant since, in a very real sense, the Jewish nation was given the power to control and shape time itself. In other words, for the Jews there existed no physical reality of time outside of what they perceived and determined it to be.

The fact that the sanctification of the new moon was the first mitzvah the Jews were given as a nation reveals something essential about what a Jew is. God granted the Jewish people this mitzvah immediately upon their birth as a nation so that they would develop the awareness that, first and foremost, they were a supernatural and eternal nation that not only transcended the limitations of time, but had the ability to exercise complete dominance over it.

"All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains."

One can imagine how radical this idea must have seemed to a people who had just come out of hundreds of years of slavery during which every minute of their time had belonged to their slave masters. Our sages tell us that the time-defying birth of Isaac, who was born to a 90-year-old woman and to a father whose constellation showed that he would never have a child, is God's way of letting us know that the roots of the Jewish nation lie in a realm beyond the limitations of nature and the physical world. In addition, the inexplicable endurance against all odds of the Jewish nation throughout history, while no other ancient nation, no matter how great and powerful, has survived, is also evidence that this is no ordinary nation, but rather one that originates from a metaphysical dimension outside of time. As Mark Twain observed: "All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?"⁴

Perhaps more than any other time in the Jewish calendar, the Sabbath enables us to enter into a dimension beyond time. The Torah refers to the Sabbath as "an eternal sign."⁵ According to the Medieval Jewish text, Reishit Chochma, this phrase signifies that the Sabbath is a "sign of eternity." Indeed, there is a distinct flavour of eternity about the Sabbath, at least for those who experience it in its full intensity. For example, on the Sabbath we are supposed to refrain from planning, discussing or preparing anything pertaining to the future, so as not to detract from the state of timelessness (and completeness) that one is experiencing; a state where one lives in the present moment alone -- one long, protracted moment that lasts an entire day. This is perhaps one of the reasons that the Sabbath is referred to as "a taste of olam haba" (the world to come), a taste of eternity.

TIME IS NO LONGER THE ENEMY

I once read about a rabbi who suggested to his students that if they only had a small amount of tzedaka (charity) money to give away, they should divide it up so as to give out a little bit each day over the course of several days rather than give it away all at once. He explained that this would enable them to spiritually elevate as many days as possible through the performance of the mitzvah of tzedaka.

This rabbi understood what I did not know when I was a younger: that human beings have the ability to immortalize both themselves and the days of their lives through the performance of mitzvot. Since the day that I began to understand this profound truth, time has ceased to be my enemy. Now I know that the longing for permanence that I have felt since I was a child stems from an intuitive feeling that permanence is something that can actually be achieved -- even in our disposable society, where just about everything, including the most sacred of relationships, has become so transient. I am grateful that I have the anchor of the Torah to keep reminding me that there are some things we can accomplish in this life that are truly everlasting.

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1 The Thinking Jewish Teenager's Guide to Life, p.106
2 Genesis, 24:1
3 Gemarah Rosh ha Shana, daf chet, amud beit
4"Concerning the Jews" Harper's Magazine, 1899
5 Exodus, 31:17

This article was written in memory of my father Mordechai ben Simcha, z"l.