Are you watching the clock as the last hours of 2001 draw near? Will you be joining the throng worldwide as the new year is welcomed at midnight on Monday and that crystal ball is lowered at Time's Square?

Every year as January 1^st draws near, I must tell you how grateful I am that we Jews have at least two new years by which to make account of time's ineluctable passage. There really are few more challenging subjects to ponder than the flight of time.

Says Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman:

We physicists work with time every day,
but don't ask me what it is. It's just too
difficult to think about.

I learned the other day that locked in a laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, there is the NBS-6. Do you know what that is? It is our nation's most sophisticated clock, and (by the way), that clock is the unquestioned basis for our determination of the length of a second. They tell me that it is accurate to within one second in 300,000 years! But guess what; it still doesn't give us a single clue as to what time really is.

Asked to define time, someone answered:

Time is nature's way of keeping
everything from happening all at once.

The Greek philosophers said that time was the stuff of which life is made. Still others remarked that it is "the soul of the world. . . . [It is] eternity begun."

The great Einstein explained it as "a matter of relativity." And then he offered his famous illustration explaining just what he meant by that.  Said Einstein,

When you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think it is for two hours. But when you sit with a pretty girl for two hours, you think it is only a minute.

The point is we just cannot define time, but, whatever it is, it certainly is beyond our control. In middle age we begin to see it on our faces when we look into the mirror, don't we? Eventually, the passage of time actually makes us look like our parents! Time's passage comes to be translated, over the course of the years, as a sense of loss and personal aging. As young parents, it seems to take forever for our babies to finally take that first step or say their first word. But then, one day, not very long after, or so it seems, that very same baby walks across a stage to accept an advanced degree. If we're smart, we'll come to fully understand that youth is a gift. Aging is a work of art.

Religious tradition, our Judaism first and foremost, has regarded time as a gift given by God. There is no such thing as "buying time," you understand that, don't you? There is no one who can earn it, either. And we are, every one of us, the recipients of the same 24 hours in every day, but the difference is how we each make use of the time we are given.

As Jews, we are bidden over and over again by our Torah and by the entirety of Jewish liturgy to redeem time, to sanctify time, to savor it, and to fill our hours and days, our weeks and years, with moral and purposeful good living.

Now one often hears references to Methuselah. "He or she is as old as Methuselah," they'll say. According to the Torah, Methuselah lived 969 years. And so far as anyone knows, that's his only distinction: 969 years of breathing and then death-a Social Security nightmare! But notice: no degrees, no books authored, no buildings designed, no poetry or music written, no grand or novel ideas articulated! Methuselah just lived-and then he died.

Judaism teaches us that ours is not just to be, but to become! Not just to spend our lives in a casual, mindless fashion, but resolutely to grab hold of and embrace life's healthy pleasures and its abundant opportunities for growth and for the enlargement of our God-given capacities for knowing and loving, for exalting our Creator by noble reaching and the stretching of our humanity to the max. By building and dreaming, by sanctifying rest and by doing good for others-that is what we are to accomplish with the time we are given here on earth.

And realizing that our lives are not forever, that your time and mine is limited because of our very nature as mortal beings, Israel's Psalmist reminds us:

We bring our years to an end as a tale that
is told. . . . For [our lives are] speedily gone, and we
fly away. So teach us to number our days, that
we may get us a heart of wisdom.

How was it that poet William Davies expressed it?
 

What is this life, if full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare-
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows;

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance,
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny compared to what lies within us.

If yesterday is experience and tomorrow is hope, then today is getting from one to the other as best as we can.

Victories today can carry the seeds of defeat tomorrow, so let's do this:

• Let's guard our tongues and say less in this New Year than we're really thinking.
• Let's keep an open mind and discuss instead of arguing-disagreeing without being disagreeable.
• Let's balance fantasy with fact.
• Let's dream, but also act.
• Let's pay little heed to those ill-natured remarks made by others about us, but rather live our lives with such grace that no one will believe them anyway.
• Let's not be bound by the past, nor settle for too little in this New Year aborn. Because, as the poet urges--

Oh! Why not now and here,
Why not today,
Before another year
Shall run away?

Keep word and faith, or ere
An hour's delay,
Make good the promise fair,
Today, today!

May we so number our days, that we get us-each of us- a heart of wisdom!