Nissan: The Beginning of History

by Rav Haggai Londin, translated by Hillel Fendel

What is time? Time is our ability to delineate and mark a process. We specify a point that marks its beginning, and from there we can proceed further, until the process ends. Time is our ability to define movement and progress. The ancient world did not have such a concept. Pagan man was a pawn within meaningless circularity: birth, work, death, and then again, and then yet again, etc. Early man did notice the change of seasons, but he did not feel the need to count these periods and years; marking a beginning and ending point was not in his awareness. 

In the pagan world, there was nothing to progress towards; there are no processes. Man was stuck in a pointless cycle from which he cannot burst out. This is actually a form of slavery. Pagan man did not create units of time, and was therefore rendered captive to the nothingness of time. He became eroded, worked from inertia, and had no control over his life. In Egypt, the cultural center of the ancient world, there was nothing beyond slavery. As the Mechilta legal midrash teaches, "At first, no slave could ever escape from Egypt, which was closed up and locked off." Not only were the Jews enslaved there, but the Egyptian 'masters,' too, found themselves enslaved, closed off to everything outside mere subsistence. There was nothing beyond random chance and nature, eroding in the circles of time.

But with the arrival of the Exodus, a new era dawns upon humanity. The month of Nissan is when time was essentially born in the world, as the Torah declares: "This month is for you the head of the months, the first for you of the months of the year" (Sh'mot 12,2). In Nissan, history sets out on its journey. From now on, there is a beginning, there is renewal, and there is the beginning of historic memory. Time has two dimensions: permanent and variable. In order that we may measure time, we need firstly a point of departure, a stable basis. Afterwards, we will attain "movement," which we will mark as change and progress. We sense this in our personal lives as well: If there is no movement towards a goal, we feel bored, we feel that time is simply not moving. 

In the Jewish year cycle, there are indeed two such axes: Shabbat, the permanent basis, and the Festivals, which stand for change and movement. Shabbat comes every six days, and is thus "permanent and lasting" (Tr. Chullin 101b), a fixed point of time ever since the Six Days of Creation. But the Jewish Festivals, on the other hand, are commemorated at different times each year, depending on what the Rabbinical Court determined regarding the new moon and the beginning of the new month.

On the first "Shabbat HaGadol," just before the Exodus, we prepared to slaughter the Egyptian sheep-god that stands for simple nature, purposeless wandering, and no concept of time. In its place, we mark the beginning point, the point at which history begins to move. A few days later comes the next stage: the Passover holiday and the birth of a nation charged with setting direction and movement in history.

To where does time take us? Where is history leading us? History is not merely "the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind,” as historian Edward Gibbon wrote. Rather, as Rav Kook explained, it is historia, a Hebrew play on words meaning "the non-revealed [events] of G-d." It is leading us in a specific direction, towards understanding, as G-d gradually reveals Himself in historia. 

The primary greatness of the Shabbat just before the Exodus continues throughout all of Jewish Historia, and brings us to the "great and awesome day of G-d" (Malachi 3,13, from a Biblical portion read aloud on this Great Sabbath). The persona of Eliyahu the Prophet – the man over whom death and time did not reign, and who ended his life on earth by ascending heavenward in a storm – is the one who will announce to us the coming of that great, timeless day: the day of Redemption that is, in the words of a Passover Haggadah hymn, "neither day nor night."