In the Hopi language, everything the power of the world does is done in a circle….the wind, in it’s greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round…even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood and so it is in everything where power moves.
The curvature of time in oral cultures is very difficult to articulate on the page, for it defies the linearity of the printed line. The alphabet alters all this, in order to read phonetically, we must disengage the synesthetic participation between our senses and the encompassing earth. A new reflexivity between the human organism and its own signs, short-circuiting the sensory reciprocity between that organism and the land (the reflective intellect is precisely this new reflexive loop, this new reflection between ourselves and our written signs). Human encounters and events begin to become interesting in their own right, independent of their relation to natural cycles.
Now, this is interesting when he discusses the Jewish culture. The ancient Hebrews were the first people to “discover” a linear, non repeating mode of time:
To the ancient Hebrews, or what we know of them through the lease of the Hebrew Bible, the cyclical return of seasonal events commanded far less attention than those happenings that were unique and without precedent (natural catastrophes, sieges, battles, and the like), for it was these non repeating events that signaled the will of YHWH, or God, in relation to the Hebrew people. In Eliade’s terms, these unique occurrences, whose consequences were often devastating (either to the Hebrews or to their enemies), were interpreted by the prophets ad “negative theophany’s,” as expressions of YHWH/s wrath. Thus interpreted, these discordant and non repeating events acquired a coherence previously unknown, and so began to stand out from the cyclical unfolding of natural phenomena. And the Hebrew nation came to comprehend itself in relation to this new, non repeating modality of time – that is, in relation to history.
For the first time, we find affirmed, and increasingly accepted, the idea that historical events have a value in themselves, insofar as they are determined by the will of God.
The Hebrews are, as well, the first truly alphabetic culture that we know of, the first “People of the Book.” Indeed, at the founding event of the Jewish nation – the great theophany stop Mount Sinai-Moses inscribes the commandments dictated by YHWH (the most sacred of God’s names) upon two stone tables presumably in an alphabetic script. (Contemporary scholars place the exodus from Egypt sometime around 1250 B.C.E.it is just at the time that the twenty-two-letter, consonantal aleph-both was coming into use in the area of Canaan, or Palestine.)
A new sense of time as a non repeating sequence begins to make itself felt over and against the ceaseless cycling of the cosmos. The variously scribed letters of the Hebrew Bible are the first sustained record of this new sensibility.
By carrying on its lettered surface the vital stories earlier carried by the terrain itself, the written text became a kind of portable homeland for the Hebrew people. BY virtue of the portable ground, the Jewish people have been able to preserve their singular culture, and thus themselves while in an almost perpetual state of exile from the actual lands where their ancestral stories unfolded.
Yet many of the written narratives in the Bible are already stories of displacement, of exile, the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden, to the wandering of the Israelites in the desert. The Jewish sense of exile was never merely a state of separation form a specific locale, from a particular ground; it was (and is) also a sense of separation from the very possibility of being entirely at home. This deeper sense of displacement, this sense of always already being in exile, is inseparable, I suggest, from alphabetic literary, this great and difficult magic of which the Hebrews were the first real caretakers. Alphabetic writing can engage the human senses only to the extend that those senses ever, at least provisionally, their spontaneous participation with the animate earth. To being to read is thus already to be displaced, cut off from the sensory nourishment of a more-than-human field of forms. It is also, however, to feel the still lingering savor of that nourishment, and so to yearn, to home, that such contact and conviviality may someday return. “Because being Jewish,” as Edmond Jabes has written, “means exiling yourself in the world, and at the same time, weeping for your exile.
Moreover, the trajectory of time, for the ancient Hebrews, was by no means linear. The holy days described in the Bible are costly bound to the intertwined cycles of the sun and the moon. Further, the non repeating, historical time alluded to by Eliade seems to correlate with the sense of existential separation and exile. It is thus that, in Hebrew tradition, the expulsion from the eternity of Eden (and, later, the destruction of the Temple) is mirrored, at the other end of sequential history, by the promised return from exile, the coming of the Messiah, and an end to separated time. The forward trajectory of time, that is, will at last open outward, flowing back into the spacious eternity of living place (“the promised land”), and so into a golden age of peace between all nations. Eternity lies not in a separated heaven (the ancient Hebrews knew of no such realm) but in the promise of a future reconciliation on the earth.
Time and space are still profoundly influenced by one another in the Hebrew Bible. They are never entirely distinguishable, for they are still informed, however distantly, be a participatory experience of place.
Pamela Chambers M.Ed., N.B.C.C.
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SCOTTDALE
Palmer Private Equity, is rooted in Kevin’s Behavioral Economic Research that once set standards for Wall Street brokerage firms.
Its Philanthropic entity invests for the public good in the family’s nonprofit. Kevin is a Financial Freedom Fighter, who as an epigrammatic writer illustrates how emotional intelligence leads to decision processes that enable economic dignity & improves quality of life.
He published two books as well as numerous articles and blogs on economic and financially related topics and his third book will be out in 2023. Kevin has also had radio appearances on NPR’s Market Place, NPR affiliate KJZZ-FM, KXTZ-FM, as well as television appearances on KPNX-TV, KVVU-TV5, KNXV-TV. He currently resides in Scottsdale, AZ
“Peace through Prosperity” projects to challenge Injustices through Self-empowerment.
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