Introduction
Living with the times
'We must live with the times,' the Rebbe said. The disciples, sitting around the table, eagerly awaiting the master's words, were perplexed. 'Live with the times? Isn't that what the enemies of faith are always saying. The past is dead; long live the future. Surely we believe the opposite, that God's word is eternal, that certain things do not change, that values and principles and laws are constant. To be a Jew is to be beyond time. What then does the Rebbe mean when he says, We must live with the times?'
'What I mean,' said the Rebbe, 'is that we must live with Parshat Hashevuah, the weekly portion of the Torah.'
Like so many Jewish stories, ancient and modern, this one, told of the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, contains hidden depths. Wherever they are throughout the world, Jews read a weekly portion of the Mosaic books - Parshat Hashevuah. It forms the music of the Jewish year. Autumn is Genesis with its tales of beginnings, the birth of the world, of humanity and of the Jewish people. Winter is Shemot, the story of exile and exodus, slavery and freedom and the beginning of the long journey through the wilderness in search of the promised land. Spring is Vayikra, with its laws of sacrifice, sometimes remote to the modern ear, yet shot through with ethical grandeur and at its fulcrum the two greatest moral imperatives of all - to love our neighbour as ourselves, and the far harder yet ultimately more important command to love the stranger, the other, the one not like us. Bamidbar ushers in Shevuot, the festival of revelation, and does so with the story of the Israelites in the wilderness, a fraught narrative of backslidings and rebellions, perhaps the most realistic narrative ever told of the birth of a nation. Summer is Devarim, that magnificent book of Moses' addresses in the last month of his life, his vision - never surpassed - of Jewish history and destiny as the people of the covenant, charged with living in faithfulness to God.
Jewish time is both cyclical and linear. We are part of nature and its rhythms - the cycle of the seasons and of a human life as we move from birth through maturity to age and wisdom and sadness as we see the next generation, those who will carry on the story when we are no longer here. But we are also part of history - time as a non-repeating sequence of events, a journey, in which no stage is exactly like any that has been or will be. Jewish time is like a fugue between these two themes, the eternal and the ephemeral, the timeless and the timely. That I suspect is what the Rebbe meant when he said we must live with the biblical portion of the week. It is that weekly encounter between the now and the then, the moment and the stasis, which frames Jewish consciousness and gives us that unique sense of living out a narrative, the biblical story, to which we ourselves are writing the latest chapter.
That, at any rate, is how I have tried to live. Religious leaders often find themselves at the cutting edge of great events. But in a sense, every Jew is called on to be a leader, and every life has its share of great events, those that change our lives or help us change the lives of others. One of the things that gives us the courage and wisdom to chart our way through the wilderness of fire is knowing that we are not alone, that God goes before us in a pillar of cloud and fire, signalling the way. The way he does so for us is through the words of the Torah, to which every Jewish life is a commentary, and each of us has our own commentary to write.
The following essays, each short and I hope simple, are records of how I have tried to live with the times through a dialogue with the Torah.