O Tempus! Time Belongs to God, Not to Us

Chronos is close to what we call “clock time.” It answers the question of where we are on the scale used to note sequential time. For example, 3:00 PM refers to an agreed point in the middle of the afternoon.

Aeon refers to the fullness of time or to “the ages.” It is akin to our notion of eternity, not as an inordinately long time but as a comprehensive experience of all time summed up as one. Only God experiences this fully, but we can grasp aspects of it. For example, we can look back on our life as a whole and see how many different things worked to get us to where we are now. In so doing, we can come up with a comprehensive meaning to the events of the past. Although the future is hidden from us, we can still conceive of it and steer our lives intelligently toward it. God sees the past, present, and future all at once. Only God lives in pure aeon, the fullness of time. Kairos is related to our concept of something being timely. There is often a particularly fitting or opportune moment for something. We might say “It was time to move on,” or “It was time to retire.” This famous passage from Ecclesiastes sets forth the kairos notion of time and ends with a reference to eternity:

… I have seen the business that God has given to mortals to be busied about. God has made everything appropriate to its time … (Ecclesiastes 3:1-11a).

Yes, there is a time for everything. We like to think we determine when that is, but more often events and time itself determine what is timely and appropriate. We are not the master of time and events. Something bigger, caught up in God’s providence, sets the agenda. We may wish to laugh or celebrate, but sometimes there comes the awareness that now is not the right time. Even a happy occasion like a birthday or an anniversary can be overtaken by other events and a time to laugh becomes a time to cry.

In my spiritual reading I recently came across the following mediation on time in Jesus’ own earthly life. It is worth pondering, especially to the degree that we think we can be the master of time:

When Luke writes that Jesus “increased in wisdom and in stature” (Lk 2:52), he is saying by this that Jesus respected time. He was not in a hurry. He could wait until “time” was right. This is also abundantly clear from his unusually long, hidden life at Nazareth. We, on the other hand, are, in practice, inclined to deny time. We try to step over time, make decisions that we are not ready to make, and carry out task that have not been given to us ….

Everything good comes from God, but he does not give everything at once. Sin is to want to have something that God does not yet wish to give, … to seize immediately what he wishes to bestow only gradually. … The New Testament speaks insistently about patience. It is a question of waiting, of staying awake, of being prepared. We cannot go into the wedding feast whenever we wish, but only when the bridegroom comes (Matthew 25:1-13). Another text warns “Behold I am coming like a thief.” (Fr. Wilfrid Stinissen, O.C.D. in Eternity in the Midst of Time, pp. 39-40)

Thus, time and the Lord of Eternity insist that we wait and that we be ready. Time belongs to God. “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty” (Rev 1:8). Every Easter we bless the Paschal Candle, which denotes the Year of the Lord. As the priest uses the stylus to cut or denote the year, he says,

Yes, all time belongs to Him. He has set the limit of our days. He has always known us (see Jeremiah 1:5). He summoned us to be; He knit us together in our mother’s womb and every one of our days was written in His book before one of them ever came to be (see Psalm 139). He is the Lord of time and history. He is the Lord of the present, and our future has always been present and known to Him.

We do well to remember all of this and to be grateful and humble. Our language about time bespeaks a certain pride and even a sense that we can beat or master time somehow. Consider some of these saying regarding time: • • Making time for things

Yes, we often think we can make time, or alter it, or know how much time we should have. Instead, we should humbly admit that we cannot alter time, turn it back, kill it, or make it.

Other expressions speak to our recognition that certain things are appropriate to certain times. Why exactly this is remains mysterious. Thus, we say things like this: • • It’s high time

Expressions such as these show how time frames us and shapes our experience. Time is experienced, not altered or mastered. Time belongs to God; by it, He frames our life and shapes our experience. We sense time’s passage, its appropriateness, its givenness. Be humble about time. You are not its master, God is. Festina lente! (Make haste, slowly).

I'm a big fan of the topic of time.

The following article is about Joseph as the Master of Time. As such, dreams are analogous to time, as he was derisively called the Master of Dreams, Ba'al ha-Chalomot (591 in the Torah's spelling, same as "all Israel").

Egypt is antithetical to this free, unobstructed flow of time, i.e., to the progress. Egypt in Hebrew is MiTzRaYiM, spelled Mem–Tzadik-Resh-Yud-Mem. This word could be broken into two—MeTzaR (constriction) and Yud-Mem. The numerical value (gematria) of Yud-Mem is 50, symbolizing the fifty gates of understanding, i.e., the Divine emanation of Binah (Rosh HaShanah 21b). In Chasidut—the philosophy of Chabad—intellectual faculties of Chochmah (Abba-father) and Binah (Immah-mother) are seen as parents giving birth to the emotions (Da’at-toldot-children). In Kabbalah, the same triad of Divine emanations—Chochmah-Binah-Da’at—can also be interpreted in terms of time, where Chochmah represents the past, Binah represents the future and Da’at represents the present.
http://www.quantumtorah.com/its-the-time-stupid/

Compare America as the Lord of Dreams (being sole owner/ba'al of the American Dream) to Manifest Destiny [הייעוד הגלוי] and Columbia the dove, the spirit of revelation (light) hovering over the face of the waters:

American Progress, (1872) by John Gast, is an allegorical representation of the modernization of the new west. Columbia, a personification of the United States, is shown leading civilization westward with the American settlers. She is shown bringing light from the East into the West, stringing telegraph wire, holding a school textbook that will instill knowledge,[1] and highlights different stages of economic activity and evolving forms of transportation.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny

Chochmah represents the past...

Which reminds me of the writing on the wall, what's visible in the present while everyone is at the tavern, oblivious to the time:

Dan 5.5. In the same hour the fingers of a man's hand appeared, and wrote opposite the lampstand upon the plaster of the wall of the king's palace; and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote:

Y
'
S

Y'S (wise), whys, why's... how many questions (4, why is this night different..)

Nobody likes a wise guy, but whatever... he owns the place and the time. GUY'S place, you might say. At No. 9.

‘To be Jewish is to ask questions’

Note that the hand, by pointing downward toward the location of the door at that time, and to the rejected stone that had become the head of the corner three times (at three different places of upcycling, at each end and then the final location in the middle, with the third time's the charm in 1835)...

... is also the letter Q, fingerspelling for the deaf.

There's a fascinating little article here at 79 about people receiving name signs. Also, name signs are given to political figures, so they are not restricted to members of the deaf community. The names even work in puns on the hearing world's language, especially as word plays on an individual's character. Now if a wise guy rates his own name sign and it's a Q, what kind of a character is that? The type who is always asking a lot of questions. How else would he be capable of designing all manner of ingenious gadgets. That's progress.

Y is for Yid, the guy who is a Jew, who is easily recognized by his kippa. A guy can point to a kippa and say, "There's a Jew." Nothing hidden about that Yid.

Q.E.D.

953 (9 + stone) is a very busy number/place. Here are a few examples:

House of Israel
Coordinated Universal Time
Holy One of Israel
Solomon 375 Yedidiah 43 Kohelet 535 (the sum of the names of the world-famous wisest king ever)
And what is his son's name, if you can tell
And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed

Discover the unknown.. it's all the same name and soul, past, present, or future.

Exo 3.
3. And Moses said, I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt:
4. And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses; And he said, Here am I:

YHVH ki sar lirot = 953

Heh, I was not even looking for that, but there it was for the checking. I'll add it to my list. After all, it states the time when the Lord saw that Moses turned aside to see:

Coordinated Universal Time (abbreviated to UTC) is the primary time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time

America has been saving the world since she came out of WWII as a superpower and devised a plan to rebuild Western Civ. The world hates America the Can-Do nation but assumes she's going to come along to save all the world's worthless ingrates from themselves anyway.

You'd think the brothers would have recognized Joseph because only Joseph would have known all the stuff that the lord of Egypt knew.

Master of Dreams... Master of Time, Joseph the "Time Man", the owner of time: ba'al hazman. 204. "Tzaddik"

Yoseph ha-Tzaddik; Yosef ha-Ba'al Hazman.

Nothing new under the sun, because

As we have already seen, early on Joseph is linked to the fulfillment of Jacob's legacy.

These are the generations of Jacob, Joseph was seventeen years old ...[Genesis 37:2]

At the outset, the Torah connects Jacob with Joseph. Of all his sons specifically Joseph holds the key to not only Jacob's but the family's ission. In this Torah portion, we will examine the implications of that mission from the mystical -- that is Kabbalistic -- standpoint. To do so, we must go back to the point where all it first began:
Joseph From the Kabbalistic Perspective

The typo draws the reader to the word [m]ission, which is the reversal of time (who else but Joseph?):

emit (v.)
1620s, from Latin emittere "send forth," from assimilated form of ex "out" (see ex-) + mittere "to send" (see mission). Related: Emitted; emitting.

Gen 45

4. And Joseph said to his brothers, Come near me, I beg you; And they came near; And he said, I am Joseph your brother, whom you sold into Egypt:
5. Now therefore be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that you sold me here; for God did send me before you to preserve life:

The date (time) that a business was established is often marked on the physical building as "Est. [year]". It's kind of a pun on time itself, EST (UTC - 5). Also, because standard time in the US is 127 days, you could call EST "Esther" time as well, when the light is hidden from view in the winter months.

These are the generations of Jacob, Joseph was seventeen years old ...[Genesis 37:2]

(we must go back to The Point where all it first began)

UTC (953) minus 5 = 948, 9 x 4 x 8, same as 1948: 1 x 9 x 4 x 8 = 288...

1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth:
2. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep; And a spirit from God hovered [m-288-t] over the face of the waters:
3. And God said, Let there be light; and there was light [238, 288 - 50]:

Another detail about time, and darkness verses light: in the current US division between daylight saving and standard time, daylight time is 238 days. When no leap day is involved, standard time is 127 days.

Exciting stuff! It's like crack to data (daat) wonks. No wonder the Patriarchs were looking forward in eager anticipation to these days, times, heh.

Joseph (as well as the king's daughter) wore a special coat, a ketonet passim.

passim: here, there, and everywhere

Used especially in citations, often with simply the name of a book or writer, to indicate that something (as a word, phrase, or idea) is to be found at many places throughout the section, book, or writings of the author cited.

If walls could talk, people might listen. :)

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