February 19, 2009
With Super Bowl XLI behind us, I can at last put aside the numerical complexities of football: three-point field goal, six-point touchdown, one-point conversion, two-point safety, two-minute rule, four downs, 10 yards — the list goes on and on.
I am, however, taken by the time-out regulations. Each team gets three of them per half, during which it takes a break from the game and strategizes for reentry.
It would be awfully nice, it seems to me, to have time-outs in life: When the circumstances of living wear us down, we get to signal to whoever is running around us at the time that we are retiring briefly and will be back. Life would stop temporarily (maybe with a commercial in some unknown planet where extraterrestrial beings are watching us).
When the time-out ends, we would bound back into our work and families like recharged football players being whistled back onto the field. We would launch new strategies in place of old ones, ready to face whatever challenges life throws our way.
Call it crazy, but that’s the sort of thing I muse about these last gray days of winter, with the dismal month of February endlessly under way, and still a lot to handle before the spring brings balmy days of sunshine and the welcome floral march of crocuses, daffodils, tulips, and the rest.
While still within these doldrums, the Jewish calendar gives us Mishpatim, a reading that promises “time out.”
Most of it is purely legal: laws of murder, mayhem, and the like. But it ends with Moses ascending Mount Sinai to meet with God for 40 days and 40 nights. The odd thing is that the story now stops for two whole weeks; it will take two sedras until we rejoin Moses on the mountain. For the interim two weeks, we get to wonder what he did those 40 days and 40 nights.
Our commentators wonder also. “How long does it take for God to write the Torah?” asks Abravanel. “Creating the entire world took only seven days!”
Sforno answers by referring to another 40-day period. For the first 40 days of their lives, newborns are considered by Halacha to have only tentative status as “alive.” Infants who die before that — God forbid — are not considered to have been fully born.
We enter this world, as it were, through birth and then rebirth: the nine months of gestation, when the fetus marshals the capacity to emerge safely from the womb, and its first 40 days, when it masters the tasks of staying alive. It takes 40 days, says Sforno, to be reborn, and that is why Moses remained so long atop Sinai — not for God’s sake, but for his own. It was a 40-day “time-out,” an opportunity to reenergize his flagging spirit when the trip from Egypt began to wear him down and his task was far from over.
But here’s the thing! Tradition credits Moses with climbing the mountain not just once, but three times — for the first tablets, then the second ones, and, in between, to plead for Israel after the episode of the Golden Calf. So Moses had three time-outs, each one lasting longer than it had to, as far as God was concerned. They each got stretched to 40 days to give Moses time to rest, re-strategize, and reemerge reborn.
The English calendar gives us February hope with Groundhog Day: the illusion of an early spring. But Groundhog Day is child’s play; it merely gets us through the winter. The Jewish calendar gives us Mishpatim and the promise of renewed life three times, just what we need: first, as young adults about to take our independent place within the world; second, in our middle years, our “mid-life crisis,” when we fear that what we’ve been doing will not sustain us through the years ahead; and third, when we retire or otherwise become what they euphemistically call a senior. Then, too, a lot of life is left — so we get a third “time-out” to consider what to do with it.
Moses did it — why shouldn’t we — take time out, I mean, three times: when we graduate college, hit middle age, and start thinking about our twilight years?
Ad me’a v’esrim — “May you live for 120 years.” That’s the traditional Jewish birthday greeting. The idea is simple. Moses lived for 120 years. Maybe we will, too. But it could equally wish us three chances to be reborn. Ad me’a v’esrim: “May you take time out for 120 days — three times 40 days — and may you make the most of each and every one of them.”
Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, cofounder of Synagogue 3000, is the Barbara and Stephen Friedman Professor of Liturgy, Worship, and Ritual at the Hebrew Union College in New York. He is the coeditor, with David Arnow, of My People’s Passover Haggadah: Traditional Texts, Modern Commentaries (Jewish Lights).
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