Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism

I submitted the final manuscript of my book, Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism, for publication in February 2020. By the time it was published, in November 2020, the world was a very different place.

The underlying contention of the book is that time is culturally constructed, historically contingent, and disciplinarily specific. The very basic assumptions we make about time are neither natural nor universal, but rather products of the societies and communities in which we live, even when they seem natural or biological because they are bound up with natural processes such as the rising and setting sun, the phases of the moon, the changing of the seasons, or the aging of our bodies. Units of time such as years, months, weeks, days, and hours, as well as our experiences of these units and of time’s passage more generally, are constructed. Moreover, the way in which we divide time and use time is not arbitrary; quite the contrary: it reveals our deepest societal and individual values, because how we choose to organize and spend our time is really a reflection of what we value.

The pre-pandemic world was one in which the constructedness of time was not always obvious – except to those whose research focuses on the history of time. How many had contemplated, for example, the fact that the seven-day week was not the way that most people divided time in antiquity, or that dividing the day into standard hours is a relatively recent phenomenon, and could be otherwise?

But in March 2020, as soon as cities shut down, routines were uprooted, and we began counting in cycles of daily virus counts, weekly testing averages, and two-week quarantines, we all became urgently aware of the constructedness of time. In its first pandemic issue, The New Yorker magazine’s cover featured Eric Drooker’s depiction of an empty Grand Central Terminal, with its iconic clock in the center and a lone figure sweeping up. The image beautifully captured the sense of uncertainty and fear, especially in New York, as we all ventured into an unknown time; time slowed or stopped for those asked to stay home, and sped up for those caring for the sick around the clock in ICUs or maintaining our cities. Now, in June 2021, cities in the United States are opening, traffic is picking up, and the previous pace of life is gradually returning; but now we all have an acute awareness that our conceptions and experiences of time are anything but inevitable.

The pandemic has made all of us keenly aware that time matters for who we are and how we live. To understand any society, past or present, we must examine that society’s conceptions and organizations of time.

Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism examines conceptions and organizations of time in rabbinic sources, composed between 200 and 600 CE in Palestine and Babylonia but with lasting influence on subsequent Jewish communities, to the present day. I argue that the rabbis of late antiquity used time-keeping and discourses about time to construct social, political, and theological difference. Rabbinic texts articulate conceptions and structures of time that promoted and reinforced new configurations of difference, and in the book I highlight four examples: imperial difference that distinguished rabbinic time from Roman time; communal difference that separated Jewish time from Christian time; gendered difference that divided men’s time from women’s time; and theological difference that contrasted the time of those who dwelled on earth from the time of those in the heavenly sphere, including God and the angels. I contend that the processes through which various forms of difference are constructed in rabbinic sources, be they, for example, differences between men and women or between Jews and Christians, cannot fully be understood without also considering the constructions, discourses, and practices of time that undergird them. That is because time—its conception and its organization—serves as a powerful mechanism through which to enact difference and forge identity.

Put simply, my book argues that time is used both to create community (as when a group of people follow the same calendar or celebrate the same set of holidays) and also to construct difference (as when a group uses a different calendar or deliberately abstains from participating in the holidays that those around them observe).

Image of Helios at the center of the zodiac mosaic at Hamat Tiberias, Israel [Image courtesy of the author].

Rabbinic sources recognize, for example, that distinctions in time-reckoning differentiate Jews from others. The Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, an early rabbinic midrash, states that a solar eclipse is a bad omen for gentiles and a lunar eclipse is a bad omen for Israel because gentiles reckon time by the sun and Israel reckons time by the moon. The midrash adds a theological dimension to its description of Israel’s calendrical system, claiming that by observing the moon every month, the Israelites regularly “lift up their eyes to their father in heaven.” The lunar calendar is thus presented as a mechanism for differentiation not only because it is distinct from the solar calendar but also because its rituals connect Israel more directly to its God. Moreover, the Mekhilta distinguishes between competing chronological systems. The midrash notes that biblical sources usually “count according to their own era” when they date events in reference to the Exodus or the temple’s construction or destruction, but that they also occasionally “count according to the era of others” when they date events relative to the start of foreign rulers. The midrash dramatically argues that relying on the times and histories of others rather than on “their own era” diverts Israel’s devotion from God and eventually leads them to subjugation and oppression under the very authorities upon whose times they rely.

These rabbinic passages, as well as others across the rabbinic corpus, depict the coexistence and tension of multiple times and time frames. They even explicitly acknowledge that different groups of people divide time differently and that doing so differentiates them one from the other. Regarding the organization of time as a mechanism for the construction of identity, subjectivity, and difference suggests that time, in these rabbinic texts, was not only (or necessarily) a dimension through which individuals and communities pass but also (or rather) a dynamic force—a powerful if intangible tool that was harnessed and even manipulated to effect certain results.

There are many dimensions to time: how a community or an individual organizes time, how it marks time, and how it chooses to spend time. These are all parts of a community’s conception of time.

Tower of the Winds from the Roman Agora in Athens featuring a water clock and a series of sundials [Image courtesy of the author].

My book begins by introducing readers to the complex topics of time and difference and their intersections. It then turns to the historical, political, and cultural context of rabbinic sources. Rather than a conventional historical contextualization, however, the story is told as a history of time, highlighting specifically temporal aspects of the Jewish, Greco-Roman, and Christian contexts in which the rabbis lived and thought. I argue that the Jerusalem temple functioned not only as a spatial center but also as a temporal center, and that its destruction precipitated a temporal trauma that disrupted the way in which time was conceived, anticipated, and experienced, and that left a practical and philosophical temporal void that the rabbis tried to fill. Those who regarded the temple’s destruction as a catastrophe and an enduring loss needed (among many other things) to reimagine and reconfigure how time was divided, marked, and used on a daily basis, and to give new meaning to their hours, days, weeks, and years – as well as to the times in which they lived. In the decades after the temple’s destruction, Jews in Palestine faced two additional temporal shifts. The Roman calendar, recently reformed by Julius Caesar, played an increasingly more dominant role in the region, not least because of the army legions stationed in the province. The growing Christian communities slowly began instituting their own times of worship in their attempt to differentiate themselves from other Jewish communities, creating yet another competing temporal system. Rabbinic sources, composed in this period, engaged with these various temporal upheavals and provide us with a lens through which to understand how this group of thinkers grappled with the confusion of living in a new era, and how they configured their time accordingly.

The remaining chapters of the book are structured around units of time and axes of difference. The chapter about Roman/Rabbinic time centers on the unit of the year, and in particular the ways in which rabbinic texts discuss annual Roman festivals. The chapter about Jewish/Christian time focuses on the unit of the week, and especially on the sacred day of that week – the Sabbath on Saturdays and the Lord’s Day on Sunday – that became a contentious subject among Jews and Christians. The chapter about men and women’s time centers around the unit of the day, and highlights rituals attached to the official start of each new day in the evenings and the dawn of a new day each morning. Finally, the chapter about divine/human time explores the unit of hours, and how people and God are imagined to use each hour of the day.

By devoting each chapter to a particular temporal cycle— annual, weekly, daily, hourly—I do not suggest that rabbis only constructed imperial difference on an annual basis, Christian difference on a weekly basis, gendered difference on a daily basis, and theological difference on an hourly basis (nor that these are the only units of time operative or forms of difference constructed in rabbinic sources). Of course these times and differences are all interrelated, such that Roman-rabbinic difference or Jewish-Christian difference were not only cultivated through annual or weekly cycles but rather all the time in a variety of ways. But in the book I decided to spotlight the diverse strategies used within rabbinic texts to order and mark a wide range of different temporal durations.

In the end, however, the unit of the day remains at the heart of the book: the significance of certain days of the year, the status of certain days of the week, practices that mark the beginnings and ends of each day, and the subdivision of days into hours and other units. The first two chapters deal with special or sacred types of days, those differentiated from other times, while the latter two chapters address quotidian time and more regular, seemingly mundane, routine temporal rhythms of the day. Thus at its core, the book is about the construction of difference in daily life, through various scales of time-keeping from the annual to the hourly.

The processes of definition and differentiation I identify in the book did not end with the redaction of the Talmuds or the composition of later midrashim. Even as these temporal developments in classical rabbinic sources were tentative and gradual—and some of their social effects unintentional—many of the temporal practices became normative in the medieval period, establishing rhythms of time for later Jewish communities. Rabbinic discussions might have begun as legal and exegetical debates among the intellectual elites of the tannaitic and amoraic periods. Once the Babylonian Talmud gained semi-canonical status and dictated Jewish life more broadly in the subsequent centuries, however, its laws were often more widely mandated, enforced, and practiced even as they continued to evolve in new historical and cultural settings. Medieval and modern legal literature and treatises devote much hermeneutical energy to interpreting prohibitions against participating in the festivals of those among whom Jews lived, marking the Sabbath, determining times for prayer, explicating the category of time-bound commandments, and further detailing the rhythms and rituals of bodily impurity and of God’s time. In other words, the conceptions of daily time in the classical rabbinic sources that are at the heart of my book did, sooner or later, directly impact many aspects of Jewish experiences of time and influence the rhythm of daily life—to this day. The book’s conclusion thus outlines how select groups of later Jews adopted and adapted (and, at times, ignored) these rabbinic concerns about time to their present circumstances and the lasting legacy of these time frames and the differences they constructed on the history of Judaism and Jewish life in the longue durée.

Sarit Kattan Gribetz is an Associate Professor at Fordham University.