As the academic year arrives, a new beginning offers hope and excitement. In this setting, I am reminded of every morning sunrise that has a calculated schedule and naturally engages symbiotically with humankind. All living beings experience darkness and light in a variety of ways.
For humans, the sun is our daily hourglass. The sun is our clock. Obligations emerge and recede in a similar manner as the movement of our sun across the horizon. Whether one’s vocation is agriculture, education, business, parenting or health, to name a few, or any other of the many pursuits that call us to act, the work we do is always, in some obvious way, aligned with the cadence of time. The source of that cadence is our sun, and that cadence, in our human experience, is what we call time.
Reflecting on who we are as a community, who we aspire to be as a nation, and how we honor truth and purpose, it is impossible to not see the contributions of western philosophy in our lives here in the United States. Many of our elected leaders espouse the worth of our philosophical origins and aspirations, with empiricism, governance, individual rights and — to a degree — universal values as beacons to be shared and sought. In fact, the United States goes to war to promote such a philosophy and schools, of every age and level, indoctrinate an understanding a specific version of who we are and where we came from. Importantly, religion holds strong in our nation.
The Judeo-Christian-Islamic claims of truth, though it may appear that they are diverse, all can agree at least on this one fact: the earthly lives we lead are temporal. There was a beginning and there will be an end. In an obvious way, we are the sunrise when we are born, and we are the sunset when we die. Every time we see the sun rise or set, we can learn something about ourselves.
Time, therefore, is sacred because the brevity of our lives is sacred. My belief is that what we call western philosophy can be observed less in the structures created, those such as investigating light and matter, convening Congress, and affirming laws, for example, are more clearly observed in how we approach the time that has been offered to us. Though not exclusive to other regions and cultures of our globe, the idea of linear time, having a beginning and moving forward in one direction, is the most consequential offer of western philosophy, an idea that is embraced by billions and is a result of the intentions of the God of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition.
My mentor in this claim? None other than Abraham Joshua Heschel and his sanctification of time in his prolegomenous book, “The Sabbath.” His argument? It is that in our effort to acquire and perfect material things we tend to lose sight of the ethereal aspect of our lives. It is the time that we have that is measured and sacred.
Heschel’s wisdom in “The Sabbath,” written in 1951, was there in the ancient Book of Job: “A mortal, born of woman, few of days and full of trouble, comes up like a flower and withers, flees like a shadow and does not last” (Job 14:1-2). The sun rises, and the sun sets. The flower blooms and the flower withers. There is a simple truth of time that cannot be dismissed.
Heshel states that “there are many who have acquired a high degree of political and social liberty, but only very few are not enslaved to things. This is our constant problem — how to live with people and remain free, how to live with things and remain independent.” Echoes of Heschel are in the conversations school teachers have about artificial intelligence (AI) and phones.
The voice of Job’s God resonates with those of us that have good days and bad, little work or an abundance of it. It is in the start of the academic year that students and teachers alike see a rising sun. The sanctification of linear time, mediated through God’s recorded words and Heschel’s read wisdom, observed anywhere and everywhere that life emerges or recedes, felt deeply in our cadence as humans, is the original truth that brings western philosophy into its historic and modern day lived existence.
Jan Flaska is the dean of Spiritual and Ethical Life at Deerfield Academy. Proudly, Jan’s ministry is diverse in observance, experience and age. His interests include ethics, philosophy and religious studies, and he serves many as a teacher, coach, advisor and listener.