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What do Albert Einstein and Hillel have to do with our celebration of Yom
Yerushalayim on May 19 (28 Iyar)?
Albert Einstein is credited with exploring and defining the relationship
between space and time. The first to break through this misty veil of
relativity, his theories will occupy and mystify scientific minds for all time.
Even to the most elementary student of high school physics, Einstein's discovery
is beckoning and staggering.
But I dare to say his discovery is not the first. Undoubtedly it is in the
universe of physical matter. But there is another world than geographic expanse.
That is the sphere of history relativity.
The reference here is to a genius whose name is known to relatively few, who
proposed and published the formula of relationship of space and time more than
sixteen hundred years ago. His name is Hillel the second, who lived in the first
part of the fourth century. He saw the disappearance of space in the life of his
people. No land, no station, no home - a people scattered throughout the world.
But space and time are related - so if there is no space for Jews, they will
stay alive for now with attention to time. Its relationship to space is
deferrable but inevitable
- and some day. So Hillel embarked the Jews on a grid of time. The connection of
moon and sun. The lunar year of 354 ½ days has to keep up with the solar year,
eleven days longer. He devised a system of leap years, seven in nineteen, the
precise order 3, 6, 8, 11, 14, 17, 19.
Always the same. No need for emergency meeting of a ritual calendar committee.
And special days will always be protected, e.g., Yom Kippur will never come
successive with the Sabbath (Friday or Sunday).
This shift from a national cultural of space to a preoccupation with time
assumed from then nothing less than an obsession with time. Sabbath begins each
Friday at a precise moment, not one minute later. Sabbath ends no earlier than.
and we all know people who will argue loudly in defense of their calculation of
the minutes. Hametz on erev Pesah may be eaten until a specific time, not a
minute later. The seder may start at a given time, not a minute earlier, and so
on. We have been a spaceless people, no land, held together by obsessive
allegiance to time, like no other religion or culture. Until now.
And then it happened. The return to space. Jerusalem, not just a victory for
paratroopers, but a reunion of space and time. A determination, unbending even
in a geopolitical world of compromise and diplomacy, that Jerusalem will not be
divided. The worship of time has been the bond of a dispersed people. Together
we exult in the reunion of the two.
Yom Yerushalayim celebrates this relativity. Congratulations, Jews, wherever and
whenever. And thank you to geniuses Hillel II and Albert Einstein.
Arnold Turetsky, Rabbi Emeritus
Temple Israel Center, White Plains, NY
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