Here is a thread my Covenant & Conversation essay on #VezotHabracha called "End Without an Ending". You can read it at bit.ly/2J5cW5d. #ChagSameach
In #Judaism, time becomes the arena of human growth. The future is not like the past. Nor can it be predicted, foreseen, the way the end of any myth can be foreseen.
Jacob, at the end of his life, told his children, “Gather round, and I will tell you what will happen to you at the end of days” (Gen. 49:1). Rashi, quoting the Talmud, says: “Jacob sought to reveal the end, but the Divine Presence departed from him.”
We cannot foretell the future, because it depends on us – how we act, how we choose, how we respond. The future cannot be predicted, because we have free will.
Even we ourselves do not know how we will respond to crisis until it happens. Only in retrospect do we discover ourselves. We face an open future. Only God, who is beyond time, can transcend time.
Biblical narrative has no sense of an ending because it constantly seeks to tell us that we have not yet completed the task. That remains to be achieved in a future we believe in but will not live to see.
We glimpse it from afar, the way Moses saw the holy land from the far side of the Jordan, but like him, we know we have not yet arrived. Judaism is the supreme expression of faith as the future tense.
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