Alef, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death

Conclusion

CONCLUSION The beginning and the end are shared in the circumference of a circle. Heraclitus The precise turn of thought charted in this book opens the possibility of a temporal triumph of temporality, the conquering of time through time.1 In an effort to pave the way to this possibility, I have explored the nexus of time, truth, and death as it emerges hermeneutically from the symbolic world of medieval kabbalah . I have not adhered to the familiar methodology adopted by scholars of Jewish mysticism, focusing on a particular historical period or individual personality ; I have organized my thoughts instead around the letters alef, mem, and tau, the consonants of the word emet, “truth,” which stand respectively for beginning , middle, and end, the three points of the curvature of the timeline. Utilizing profound—I am tempted to say abysmal—imaginative ruminations on time elicited from kabbalistic sources, I have sought to articulate an ontology of time that is a grammar of becoming. The correlation of truth and divinity underscores that truth, which embodies in its semiotic constellation the triadic structure of temporality, is the mark of the divine eternally becoming in time—a formulation that is still too dichotomous, as the divine becoming is not an event in time but the eventuality of time, an eventuality instantiated in the momentous eruption of the moment wherein life and death converge in the coming to be of that which endures everlastingly and the endurance of that which comes to be provisionally. By heeding the letters of emet we have come to discern something of the truth of time manifestly concealed in the time of truth, the beginning that cannot begin if it is to be the beginning, the middle that re/marks the place of origin and destiny, and the end that is the figuration 175 Conclusion 176 of the impossible disclosing the impossibility of figuration, the finitude of death that facilitates the possibility of (re)birth, the closure that opens the opening that closes. Here, at the end, we would do well to recall a powerfully poetic account of eternity’s conquest of time offered by Rosenzweig2 in the concluding section of Der Stern der Erlösung: To live in time means to live between beginning and end. He who would live an eternal life, and not the temporal in time, must live outside of time, and he who would do this must deny that “between.” But such a denial would have to be active if it is to result, not just in a not-living-in-time but in a positive living eternally! And the active denial would occur only in the inversion. To invert a Between means to make its After a Before, its Before an After, the end a beginning, the beginning an end. And that is what the eternal people does. It already lives its own life as if it were all the world and the world were finished. In its Sabbaths it celebrates the sabbatical completion of the world and makes it the foundation and starting point of its existence. But that which temporally speaking, would be but starting point, the law, that it sets up as its goal. Thus it experiences no Between for all that it naturally, really naturally, lives within it. Rather it experiences the inversion of the Between. Thus it denies the omnipotence of the Between and disavows time, the very time which is experienced on the eternal way.3 In this passage, Rosenzweig articulates his celebrated theological notion of the metahistorical destiny of Judaism set in contrast to the historical fate of Christianity, eternal life’s surmounting of the eternal way.4 For the one who lives beyond history, the beginning is the end, the end the beginning. The surpassing of time is experienced in the fullness of time, the spontaneous recurrence of what has never been—only that which has never been can recur—in the instant that has no before or after.5 Linear time is eternalized in the circular rhythms of the sacred time of liturgy and ritual, a process exemplified especially in the celebration of Sabbath.6 The Jewish Sabbath instantiates the coalescence of past, present, and future, the temporal correlates of the theological categories of creation, revelation, and redemption. In the life of the Jew, who lives in and from the end, time has been proleptically redeemed and the experience of the between fulfilled. The disavowal of time does not imply an abrogation or...