La Clepsydre: Essai sur la pluralité des temps dans le judaïsme, and: Time Matters: Time, Creation, and Cosmology in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (review)

The Jewish Quarterly Review, XCII, Nos. 3-4 (January-April, 2002) 598-601 Sylvie Anne Goldberg. La Clepsydre: Essai sur la pluralité des temps dans le judaïsme. Paris: Albin Michel, 2000. Pp. 398. Tamar M. Rudavsky. Time Matters: Time, Creation, and Cosmology in Medieval Jewish Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Pp. xviii + 287. Ironically, the year 2000 of the Christian Era began with two important books by Jewish scholars on the concept of time among Jews. One book is La Clepsydre by Sylvie Anne Goldberg of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris; the other is Time Matters by Tamar M. Rudavsky of Ohio State University. Both books have clocks on the cover: La Clepsydre catches our eye with a 19th century synagogue clock from Pisek, Bohemia ; Time Matters features the sundial atop the old Immigrant Shelter building in Jerusalem. Both books are concerned with the relationship between our subjective consciousness of time and our objective clocks. Both also raise the question of whether there is a particularly Jewish consciousness of time. However, the two books are very different in their scope and their approaches . La Clepsydre is subtitled "an essay on the plurality of times in Judaism," and seeks to understand the different sorts of consciousness of time found in Judaism. To this end, it consults biblical and rabbinic sources, and refers to medieval and modern texts only to the extent that they clarify or elaborate on those sources. Its approach is that of cultural history, or what is called in France anthropologie historique. Time matters is subtitled "time, creation, and cosmology in medieval Jewish philosophy," and seeks to explicate the main statements of medieval Jewish philosophers on these abstruse physical and metaphysical topics. Its approach is that of the history of philosophy. Goldberg's book explores the mentalité of the Jewish masses; Rudavsky's explores the minds of the Jewish philosophic elite. La Clepsydre is divided in two parts: Part I discusses Ie temps conté (pp. 37-152) and Part II discusses Ie temps décompté (pp. 153-330). The suggestive distinction between these two kinds of time is that between narrated time and measured time, recounted time and counted time, or time told and time tolled. The distinction is roughly similar to the Aristotelian one between continuous and discrete time (cf. pp. 93-97), except that Ie temps conté is not conceived of as an empty or pure duration, but as a human story. Part I asks, "What is Jewish time?" or "What is the story that constitutes time for the Jews?" Part II discusses temporal, eschatological, historiographical, and mathematical scansions of time. Just as a poem may be scanned, that is, divided into feet, accented and unaccented syllables, TWO BOOKS ON TIME—HARVEY599 caesurae, etc., so Ie temps conté can be scanned, that is, divided into eras, years, months, days, holy days, etc. If Ie temps conté is a poem, Ie temps décompté is its meter. The poem is about human beings and God, creation and redemption, enslavement and liberation, expulsion and return, rejoicing and suffering, love and awe. The meter is both lunar and solar; it is marked not only by days, months, and years, but also by portions of the Torah , Hanukkah candles, the offering of the first sheaf of the barley harvest, and so forth. Many of its accented syllables have to do with the exodus from Egypt, the revelation at Mount Sinai, or the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem first by the Babylonians and then the Romans. In Jewish time, Goldberg argues, past, present, and future are intertwined, and comprise one perpetual narrative, much as the stanzas of a great poem are intertextually bound together, and cannot be understood apart from one another. Goldberg is a perceptive and eloquent observer of Jewish lore and customs, and La Clepsydre is a fascinating essay. Time Matters is divided into six chapters: "Time and Cosmology in Athens and Jerusalem" (pp. 1-21); "Time, Creation, and Cosmology" (pp. 2357 ); "Time, Motion, and the Instant: Jewish Philosophers Confront Zeno" (pp. 59-94); "Temporality, Human Freedom, and Divine Omniscience" (pp. 95-148); "Prelude to Modernity" (pp. 149-173); and...