REDEFINING SACRED TIME

Mircea Eliade is one of the key writers on comparative religion who has stressed the differences between the secular (the everyday world) or profane (literally, what is outside the temple) and the sacred (that which is set apart).   One of the differences is the sense of time.  In tribal societies the myths tell of how the world of mankind comes to be, and the ceremonies of the group are meant to mark the events in a kind of cycle.  Time itself is not seen as unidirectional with the past over and the future yet to be.  Human existence itself is understood only in terms of the sense of a cycle, and in India we saw this expressed with the idea of reincarnation and the wheel of rebirth.  There is not really the sense of history, as we understand it, and certainly there is not the Western vision of change and progress.  A tradition that resists what we call modernization is not then simply a blind attachment to the past.  Instead, it becomes the affirmation of a timeless reality. 

It is with this thought in mind that we need to look at the significance of the stories of Genesis and Exodus.  Abraham is presented as an individual chosen by God.  A deal (a covenant) is made according to which Abraham's descendants are promised their own land, and this promise is repeated with Abraham's grandson, renamed Israel.  In later centuries the importance of the covenant is reasserted with Moses, who is to lead his people toward their promised land even if he will not live to reach it himself.  

These are presented as historical events, distinct points in time.  The religious ceremonies of the Jewish people, unlike those we find in tribal traditions or in Asia, center on reenactments of historical events, most notably the manner in which their ancestors under Moses escaped slavery in Egypt.  They are performed in a yearly cycle, but they do not reflect a mythological world somehow outside of history.  Instead, they mark a definite past in which a promise has been made and they anticipate a future in which that promise will be fulfilled when a new anointed leader, a new messiah, comes to restore the Temple in the land of Israel.

Christianity, which appears as an offshoot of Judaism, maintains much of this original imagery.  Jesus is seen as the promised messiah (in Greek, christos) who marks a new covenant and also a different conception of just what the kingdom of heaven is supposed to be.  For the early Christians, the concept was that Jesus, already risen from the dead, would return again to earth to mark an end to the world as we know it. 

Islam also takes on this sense of a dramatic vision of time.  Muhammad is a descendant of Abraham's firstborn son, Ishmael, and his role is to be the last prophet in a succession from Abraham and Moses and  Jesus.  In Genesis, jealousy leads Abraham's wife to demand that Hagar, the slave who was Ishmael's mother, be banished along with her son so that he would not share Isaac's inheritance, but God rescues her in the desert and makes a promise that Ishmael also will be the father of a great nation.  In the Qur'an the story of the miraculous well that allowed Hagar to save her son's life is repeated, only now the setting is the future site of Mecca and Abraham and his son together build the Kaaba, and it is Ishmael rather than Isaac whom God initially orders Abraham to sacrifice.   As in Christianity, there is also a sense of direction in that time as we know it will end, and there is a similar picture of Jesus, although the Muslim version is that he was never actually executed but instead taken up to heaven to await a time when he would return to convert all Jews and Christians to Islam.

The theologians' discussion of how the world will end is known as eschatology (from the Greek for "last things").  It becomes important once there is the notion that immortality must have a physical component so that there has to be a resurrection of the body.  This idea was missing in early Judaism but became more apparent at the time of Jesus, and in medieval Judaism it was affirmed by Maimonides as one of thirteen key beliefs.  Jewish thought is still divided on the question of whether the soul survives in any personal sense (a common affirmation is that immortality is simply how one is remembered), but for Christians and Muslims it is crucial, and for both it is unacceptable to think of the human soul as an entity that is meant to exist in a succession of bodies (the idea of reincarnation) or to have an eternal existence of its own apart from the body.  Inevitably this means that there has to be a consideration of when souls and bodies are reunited so that heaven and hell are not just supernatural repositories but descriptions of what replaces the universe we now know.  Another way of saying this is that time runs out, no longer just for individuals but for the world itself.

As we go on through this second half of the course you will have more of a chance to think about the Christian and Muslim reworking of themes initially appearing in Judaism.  Right now I am asking you to look at the importance of the story of Abraham as redefining the relationship between a sacred time depicted in mythology and the world of human events.  The Abrahamic religions, unlike those of the ancient world otherwise, place an importance on individuality.  There is a promise that each person matters because of a commitment made by God to one individual and his descendants.  Judaism itself saw this as limited by birth, while Christianity and Islam saw it as extending to all humanity. 

There are a few points that I encourage you to research further.  One is the history of the Zionist movement that led to the restoration of Hebrew as a spoken language and to the creation of the modern state of Israel.  A question you should try to answer is why it is that Hasidic Jews opposed the Zionist movement and continue to refuse to recognize the legitimacy of Israel as a state.  How do you think this outlook expresses still a further redefinition of sacred time?

Another is how the Holocaust led some Jewish thinkers, most notably Richard Rubenstein, to renounce the idea of a covenant and to develop what came to be called a "death of God" theology.  Do you think that events such as the Holocaust do in fact undercut the notion that there is a God who means to protect the children of Abraham?

Finally, note that in Asian traditions historical events might reflect divine intervention but there is never the concept that history as such has a purpose or a sense of direction, as we see it in the Abrahamic religions.  Do you think the idea that there is a divine script for events requiring human cooperation is more likely or less likely to support a political fanaticism?