20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs

Eternity and Time

Eternity and Tillle David Ellenson R eflecting on the attempt to define the relationship between the eternal and the time bound, T. S. Eliot observed, "To apprehend/The point of intersection of the timeless/With time is an occupation for the saint." 1 To grasp the point in which eternity and time meet is also a task for the theologian. Philosophy, however, poses serious problems to this task, for it has classically regarded the realm of time as one of endless flux and succession, as a series of irreversible moments marked by coordinates of "before" and "after." Transitoriness is the fate of all things existent in time. Eternity, in contrast, is seen as impervious to succession and passage. It does not signify an infinite succession of times. Rather, it points to a transcendence above and, by extension, an immutability beyond all existence in time. The Bible itself reveals this conceptual division between what exists in time and what is eternal; in the words of the Psalmist: "Of old You established the earth; the heavens are the work of Your hands.!They shall perish, but You shall endure; they shall wear out like garments; You change them like clothing and they pass away.! But You are the same, and Your years never end" CPs. 102:26-28). 190 ETERNITY AND TIME The distinction between the temporal and the eternal has posed a number of problems for theologians. Central among them has been the issue of how God, who is eternal, unchanging, and therefore seemingly removed from passage, can relate to the temporal and act, as the Bible and rabbinic literature assert God does, in history. Jewish theologians in the Middle Ages wrestled laboriously with this dilemma of how a transcendental God for whom time does not exist could call into existence a world of matter, creating it within the limits of space and time, and, in addition, reveal himself in that world without thereby subjecting himself to the limitations and mutations inherent in the nature of the universe itself. Maimonides, for example, attempted to resolve the problem by positing an incorporeal God who possessed an eternal will unbound by natural laws. Depending upon an Aristotelian definition of time, he asserted that time possessed no independent reality and was, instead, a product of the motion of the heavenly bodies. Time came into existence with the creation of the world. Prior to creation, God existed alone in a timeless eternity. As God is incorporeal, God has no relation to motion and, consequently, none to time. Maimonides thus claimed to view God's creation of the world in time as a miracle, an extraordinary and unique event produced by the will of God. It is on account of this "belief in the creation of the world in time" that "all miracles become possible and the law [that is, God's revelation in space and time] becomes possible" (Guide 2, 25). Timelessness thereby remains an attribute of the creating and revealing God who simultaneously dwells in an eternity beyond time and space. In recent generations, Abraham Isaac Kook and Abraham Joshua Heschel altered the boundaries of the medieval discussion concerning time and eternity by abandoning the focus on the philosophical problem of the relationship between time/space and eternity. Rather, they centered their discussion of time around the traditional Jewish issue of how time could be hallowed, that is, how the sancitity and holiness of the transcendent God could be made immanent in the activities of this world. In his prayerbook commentary on the Maimonidean hymn Yigdal, Kook wrote that time exists only for humanity, not for God. Reflecting a Kantian notion of time as a human construct of apperception, Kook argued that human existence is bound up with time and that time appears as a flow from which persons cannot escape. However, Kook posited that there is an existence-a true existence that is the source of human and material existence-beyond the ravages of time, beyond the natural processes of generation and decay. The absolute, unlimited God is not coeval with the world and the human beings God has created. Indeed, it is on this basis that Kook attacks the Christian doctrine of incarnation for its notion of the consubstantiality of God with ETERNITY AND TIME 191 humanity. Instead, Kook posits that Judaism teaches a unio mystica, the ultimate unity of all being-the eternal with the transient. The religious spirit...