Parshat Emor – 5764

Counting Time and “Time” Magazine

Parashat Emor was my Bar-Mitzvah Parashah, and it brings back a flood of memories of my youth, especially of parents, Z”L, family and friends, as they were then. I remember the D’var Torah I said in shul on that Shabbat, written by my father, A”H, having to do with “Sephirat HaOmer,” a Mitzvah whose source is this Parashah, and having to do with counting the days and weeks between the 2nd Day of Pesach and Shavuot. How interesting it is that the Torah commands us to count time, whereas to count people, for example, is prohibited. We count the days to happy events, and from sad events. We count weeks, we count months and we count years. Moshe Rabbeinu, in the Chapter beginning “A Prayer of Moshe, the Man of G-d,” asks HaShem in Tehilim (90:12), “Let us know how to count our days, and we will bring before You a heart of Wisdom.”

On Yom Kippur, we recognize that from the perspective of Eternity, our lives are like “...a passing shadow, a dissipating cloud, a wind that blows, dust that flies and a fleeting dream.” But HaShem created the human being to live within the perspective of mortality, within which he can accomplish great and holy things. In Avos (5:25) Yehudah ben Tema maps out a generic roadmap of life: “He used to say, ‘A five-year-old begins the study of Scripture; a ten-year-old begins the Mishnah; a thirteen-year-old (boy, and a twelve-year-old girl) become obligated to observe the Commandments; a fifteen-year-old begins the study of Gemara; an eighteen-year-old goes to the marriage canopy; a twenty-year-old begins the pursuit of a livelihood; a thirty-year-old attains full strength; a forty-year-old attains insight; a fifty-year-old can offer counsel; a sixty-year-old attains seniority; a seventy-year-old attains a ripe old age; an eighty-year-old attains strength;...’ ” and I’ll stop here. In the next Mishnah (5:26), the Tanna Ben Bag-Bag advises how to cope with one’s limitations of time: “...Delve into it (the Torah) and continue to delve into it, for everything is in it; look deeply into it; grow old and gray over it, and do not stir from it, for you can have no better portion than it.”

Our shul has gone through a demographic life-cycle. When we arrived in 1978, around the same time as a number of other families, we found a young shul that had just put up a new building through the efforts of its founders, who were then celebrating Bar-Mitzvah’s and just beginning to marry off children. Our crowd was in the “maternity ward” phase then. Later we entered the Bar and Bat Mitzvah phase. And now our children are going to the “chupah.” Both of our former rabbis have made successful Aliyot. The shul has wandered rabbi-less in a bit of a daze for a short while. But signs are good that we’re about to acquire the services of a young, new rabbi, full of energy, enthusiasm and Torah. And the shul seems poised for rebirth, B’Ezrat HaShem.

There is an interesting article in this week’s “Time” Magazine about what “makes teens tick.” It links behavior to newly observed physiological changes in brain structure. In the article, we find: “Now that MRI studies have cracked open a window on the developing brain, researchers are looking at how the newly detected physiological changes might account for the adolescent behaviors so familiar to parents: emotional outbursts, reckless risk taking and rule breaking,... Increasingly, the wild conduct once blamed on ‘raging hormones’ is being seen as the by-product of two factors: a surfeit of hormones, yes, but also a paucity of the cognitive controls needed for mature behavior.”

“The thickening of all this gray matter – the neurons and their branch-like dendrites – peaks when girls are about 11 and boys 12 ˝ ...” (Note the closeness to the ages of maturity, according to Jewish Tradition, of girls and boys) “...at which point a serious round of pruning is under way. Gray matter is thinned out at a rate of about 0.7% a year, tapering off in the early 20’s. At the same time, the brain’s white matter thickens. The white matter is composed of fatty myelin sheaths that encase axons and, like insulation on a wire, make nerve-signal transmissions faster and more efficient, with each passing year (maybe even up to age 40)...” – Yehuda ben Tema’s age for the attainment of Insight.

“Most scientists believe that the pruning is guided both by genetics and by a use-it-or-lose-it principle. Nobel prizewinning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman has described that process as ‘neural Darwinism’ – survival of the fittest (or most used) synapses. How you spend your time may be critical. Research shows, for instance, that practicing piano quickly thickens neurons in the brain region that controls the fingers...”

Chaza”l understood the life-cycle of the human being from beginning to end. And that is why Yehudah ben Tema prescribed specialized cognitive activity for ages 5, 10, 13 and 15, when the logical and analytical activity of studying Gemara is begun, founded on the data base of the Written and the Oral Torah. And Ben Bag-Bag pointed the way towards the idea that “How you spend your time may be critical” when he said, “Delve into it and continue to delve into it,... for you can have no better portion than it.”

Rabbi Pinchas Frankel

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