Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber
Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue
Saturday 18 October 20251 — bar mitzvah of Leo
- What is time? According to the 1920s sci-fi writer Ray Cummings, time is “what keeps everything from happening at once”.2
- So, then, time is what means that you, Leo, are having your bar mitzvah this morning, while your sisters have some years still to go. Time is what means that we all knew when to arrive, and that we, hopefully, got enough sleep overnight to prepare us for such a special day.
- Time is also key to the Torah portion which you read so beautifully for us: the first four days of Creation.
- On the first day, God created light. This had to happen on the first day: in fact, by definition, whenever it happened would be the first day. Abarbanel, a Torah commentator who lived in 15th-century Portugal, explains: “The blessed Creator realised that the light was good, in order that we could use it to measure out our days. When things were eternally dark, it is impossible to mark time or to distinguish one act from another. Yet God also saw that, if it were eternally light, we likewise could not mark time.”3
- In other words, until there was darkness – until it became possible to mark time – there could be no evening, there could be no morning, there could be no first day. Everything would, in the words of the Doctor, be “a big ball of wibbley-wobbley, timey-wimey stuff”.4
- More to the point, if we lived in a world filled always and only with light, if our entire lives were like an endless Icelandic summer, we would be impoverished. We’re human beings and we need contrast.
- When you wrote to me, Leo, you told me that your two favourite subjects at school are science and art, because “they allow [you] to make [your] own decisions and choices”. Science and art are, in many ways, extremely contrasting subjects, but you’ve rightly noticed that they also have a lot in common.
- Similarly, the existence of light allows us to explore the world around us, but the existence of darkness allows us to explore the worlds around us. As the poet Diane Ackerman has said: “What we call ‘night’ is the time we spend facing the secret reaches of space, where other solar systems … dwell. Don’t think of night as the absence of day; think of it as a kind of freedom. Turned away from our sun, we see the dawning of far-flung galaxies. We are no longer sun-blind to the star-coated universe we inhabit.”5
- The Genesis narrative you read, Leo, doesn’t mention other planets, yet there they are in the sky, obviously created, uniquely visible to us thanks to the darkness God ordained on the first day. Conventionally, we might say that nighttime is simply a time to recharge our iPads and wait for the next morning. But we should also say that daytime is a time to count down until the next evening, until darkness falls and we can celebrate the beauty of the universe, and the beauty of the time which is being marked.
- A bar mitzvah is time-marking par excellence. 13 trips around the sun it took you to get to this moment. You’ve had to fit a huge amount of hard work on top of your science and art and all the other things you do with your life. Isn’t it lucky that not everything happens all at once! You’ve done your family proud, and we wish you מזל טוב.
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Shavua tov!
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Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber 