Tourists From The Future
Freedom, Memory, Waiting
It was evening all afternoon./It was snowing/And it was going to snow. (Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”)
Contemporariness is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disconnection. (Giorgio Agamben, “What is a Contemporary?”)
Now when Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them by way of the land of the Phillistines, although it was nearer; for God said, “The people may have a change of heart when they see war, and return to Egypt.” So God led the people roundabout, by way of the wilderness at the Sea of Reeds…(Exodus 13:17-18)
On Seder night we went from “degradation to exaltation.” We sang songs about the future redemption of the world. For a brief moment, we stood outside of time. But now that Seder is over, we have begun the Omer period, a time of counting, of waiting, even mourning. Was the freedom we tasted less than a week ago a mirage?
There is an ambiguity at the heart of the seder. On the one hand, it’s a night of liberation. On the other hand, it’s a night of commemoration. In one paradigm, we are already redeemed; in the other, we are somewhere else—remembering our past redemption and hoping for a future one. We are not, or not yet, redeemed; perhaps we are even a bit disassociated. Are these modes the same? Pesach is called “zman cheruteinu” (a time of freedom), but it’s also called chag hamatzot (a holiday of matzahs), and matzah is lechem oni, the bread of affliction. How could we celebrate our freedom when our story has just begun? Unless we are celebrating the beginning itself, the possibility of possibility.
The special Torah reading this week, from parashat Beshalach, returns us from the regular flow of Leviticus back to Exodus. It begins by telling us that God took our ancestors the long route to Israel, rather than the short one. The content suits the context—just when you thought the Torah follows a unidirectional movement from Genesis to Deuteronomy, you are brought to retrace your steps. And just when you thought you were free, you were enjoined to consider freedom as a laborious process rather than a one-and-done achievement. The longest path is the shortest one.
On seder night, we recite the odd text, “My father was a wandering Aramean.” This was the first commemorative script in Jewish history, recited by pilgrims in the Temple of Jerusalem upon the offering of their “first fruits,” the first liturgical prayer recorded in the Torah. But it’s disorienting. We are not in the Temple when we read it. Where are our fruits? The original force of the text is that our ancestors expressed gratitude in a moment of abundance. They remembered how far they’d come from bondage to sovereignty, from idolatry to purposeful worship, from the endless grind sanctified effort. But to place that text in the home-based seder serves a different point, namely that we are to cultivate gratitude regardless of what we have and regardless of where we are. First fruits become a metaphor for the realization that we are never as empty-handed as we think. It’s ironic, then, that the Omer period, which follows our recitation of the “My father was a wandering Aramean” passage, is a time of preparation, not arrival.
One could come up with many more examples of Pesach-induced dissonance. Dayennu is a classic. We sing that it would have been enough if God had taken us out of Egypt, but not done a number of things that have not yet occurred within the narrative frame of Seder night—the giving of the Torah will occur on Shavuot, at the end of the Omer, for example. The weirdness of Dayennu isn’t that, contrary to what we say, it wouldn’t have been enough. Rather, it’s that the subjunctive historical perspective of the song presumes that we are on the other side of it, looking back, when we are not. The seder continuously breaks its own frame.
The connection between freedom and the memory of freedom is also thematized in the story of the five sages of B’nei Brak, who debate whether the commandment to remember the Exodus “all the days of your life” means that we must remember the Exodus even at the End of Days, when the world is redeemed. Assuming that it does, or that the rabbis think it does, means that the ability to remember our story isn’t incidental to the story; it is the story. Memory is a sign, condition, and responsibility of being free. Adorno recapitulates the rabbinic thesis when he writes, “the only philosophy that can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.”
According to narrative logic, all stories have a beginning, middle, and end. But according to mythic logic, beginning, middle, and end contain one another. Seder thus contains Omer and Omer, Seder. To be free and to be displaced, lost in the desert, co-exist. While positive psychology might tell us to focus primarily on what we have, and Freudian psychotherapy might tell us to focus primarily on our trauma, a mystical perspective grants that alienation and fulfillment are inextricably entwined.
Is counting the Omer a kind of PTSD, a form of rationing our days? Or is it a sign of freedom that time is now ours to count, to imbue with intentionality? Perhaps it is both. We asked Pharaoh, initially, to leave Egypt temporarily so that we could observe our holidays. Instead, we left for good and must observe our everydayness.
The calendar is ours, but our sense of time no less mystifying. To riff on a metaphor from Rav Hutner, the world to come is the latent cry waiting to emerge from this world; it is the revelation contained implicitly in our waiting. The Torah has been given and has yet to be given; we were free and we were going to be free.
Stephen Hawking asks, “If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from the future?” But Hawking’s question presumes we would recognize the tourists from the future as such. Perhaps we are the tourists from the future. And perhaps we can no more see the future from which we’ve come than we can know ourselves. The face looking in the mirror is not the face that sees.
We have come back from the redeemed future so that we might anticipate a future in which we could remember this moment.
Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
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