If Not Now, When?

Written by Rabbi Elliott Karstadt — 19 March 2023

This shabbat is Shabbat HaChodesh, in which we begin the process of preparing for Pesach. In the Torah we read of God saying to Moses and Aaron: ‘This month shall mark for you the beginning of the months’ (Exodus 12:2). It marks the moment in the Torah in which the Israelites begin to receive the law – the mitzvot – on which our Jewish religion is based. The context is the moment in which the Israelites are commanded to put the blood of the lamb upon their doorposts, so that the Angel of Death will pass over. It is that sacrificial lamb, the pascal lamb, which gives us the name of the festival – Pesach. And we put a shank bone on our seder plates to commemorate it.

The Rabbis of the Midrash hone in on a particular aspect of the verse I quoted: ‘This month shall mark for you the beginning of the months’ – and they ask why it says ‘for you’, because it doesn’t need to. For the Rabbis of the Talmud and Midrash, there are no wasted words in the Torah, so it must have some meaning.

Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi constructs a parable to explain it:

There was a king who had a watch, and he would look at it and know the time of day. He did not do anything until his son came of age, [at which point] he said to him, ‘My son, until now this clock was in my hand, [but] from now on it will be given to you.’ So the Holy Blessed One would sanctify months and intercalate years, until Israel came of age [at which point God said] to them, Until now the responsibility of the months and the years was in my hand [but] from now on they are given over to you.

In the moment of our liberation, while we waited in expectation of liberation from Egypt, we are reminded of our responsibility. In the moment in which we are handed the freedom of adulthood, we are handed the responsibilities of adulthood as well. No longer will decisions be made for us – we are responsible for deciding what to do with the precious life that has been given to us.

The Psalmist says in Psalm 90: Limnot yameinu ken hoda, v’navi l’vav khochmah – ‘teach us to number our days, so that we may obtain a wise heart’. In reciting the psalm, we do not ask God, ultimately, to save us from death. Rather, we ask for an appreciation of our lives, and for the lives of our loved ones. The knowledge of our impermanence – of the fact that we live a certain number of days – is a call to action, and a reminder of our responsibility – to ensure that our lives have an impact on those around us, and that we do something, however small, to make the world a better place in the limited time we have.

The Tallit – this garment that we wear to remind us of the mitzvot – is also the garment in which we might be buried when we die. It acts as a reminder both of our connection to Judaism, but also of the limitations of time – that we do not, in fact, have forever in which to achieve our potential.

In the words of John Lennon in a song he wrote for his son: ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.’ And in the words of Ecclesiastes: ‘remember your creator in the days of your youth’ (12:1) – in other words, act now on the things that make you happy and act now on the things that will benefit others. If we had forever, and we did not have to number our days, perhaps we never would. That is what the king’s watch reminds us.

It is also something that we can only appreciate if, every now and again, we stop and evaluate our lives. Shabbat gives us that ability to reflect and to do that exercise of numbering our days – 1 to 6. How often do we actually spend this time reflecting on what we have done over the last week, ensuring that what we have decided to do with our precious time is actually what we think will make the most difference.

So, let us take advantage of this Shabbat to reflect on our days – to number them so that we gain a heart of wisdom, and let us not lose sight of the things that make us happy and the things that will help us to repair the tears in the world around us. For, as Rabbi Hillel famously asked, if not now, when?