The Occupation of Time.
I; Carmiel, have never been good with time. The running joke in my family is that I have been arriving late to things since the day I was born. My mother went into labour on April 1, but I took my time and was only born on April 2. The ultimate April fools joke according to my mother. Ever since, I have been taking my time, late to most places I go. It is almost as if time is a concept from a parallel universe, one that carries little relevance for me.
In High School; my nickname ‘Zerny’, came to encompass the very idea of someone who lives in his own world, unconcerned by elements such as time. My service in the military rectified this to a degree, but my chronic lateness has always been an issue. It is both my Achilles Heel and also, quite strangely, something I have come to accept and later, like about myself. The rest of the world could conform to a schedule for all I cared; I had my own pace. It made me a happier person, so why not?
Edward Verrall Lucas knew well what he was saying when he reflected that he had, “…found that those who are late tend to be much happier than those who have to wait for them”. Naturally, there were consequences, and I have often been on the other end of admonishment for my tardiness.
There was also a darker side to this phenomenon which I began to address here — and hope to write more about in a later piece.
As time and it’s consequences have been a life long occupation of mine, I found Andrew Niccol’s blockbuster film, “In Time” a fascinating piece of work. The film takes place in a dystopian future in which scientific progress has brought about an era where people do not have to die. To avoid overpopulation, time becomes currency. Once people reach the age of 25, their clock begins, and they buy and sell everything with time. If and when they run out of it, they die. The wealthy can live for hundreds of years while the poor; especially the honest ones live short lives. The rich can take their time, meander aimlessly from one place to another. But the less fortunate, often find themselves running from one location to another, every moment valuable. Checkpoints separate the various social classes, and these came to mind when one Friday, once again, I was late.
I had an engagement planned with my friend Ahmed. The two of us were going to meet over hummus in Western Jerusalem, a birthday tradition that started a while back. As it was my birthday week, it was time for this tradition to come to pass.
Embarrassed that I was late to my own birthday event, I dropped Ahmed a text to let him know that I would not be there on time. He responded a few seconds later
- ‘Take your time; I am stuck at the checkpoint’.
I don’t think most Israelis or even Jews visiting our country ever put much thought into the reality that checkpoints force upon their captives. Yes, we all know they exist. Most of us understand the security reasoning behind them. We all recognize that checkpoints exist to stop dangerous people and that in the process, affect the lives of millions who have no violent intentions what so ever. The moral rationale is clear, albeit not agreed upon: many are inconvenienced to various degrees to ensure the safety of a specific group of others.
While it may seem clear that life is worth more than a few minutes, or even hours of someone’s time, it does beg the question as to what happens when it is no longer about safety and security, but rather the consequence of a mired down bureaucracy mixed with a healthy dose of racism?
At what point do we voice our concerns for a people who historically never had a voice?
A significant detriment to action among the Jewish community is that in our attempt to grasp the concept of a checkpoint, we parallel the experience to that of our own. We think of airport security or the security check on our last visit to the mall. But these experiences could not be farther apart from that of a Palestinian at an Israeli checkpoint. When you go to the Airport, there is a balance between the security rationale and the time it takes. Money is involved, and you are a customer — security personal can’t hold up the line for hours on end unless there is a real and grave security concern. Questions are asked politely; permission is asked before they pat you down or open your bags. Most importantly — you are assumed innocent until it is clear that you are not. This is nothing like a checkpoint (or for that matter, the experience of a Palestinian in an Israeli Airport) where it becomes clear that “The Occupation” is not only and so much about land but rather so much more about Time.
Have you ever thought about what it is like to live a life where time doesn’t matter? Not because you have it in abundance, but rather because you have absolutely no control over it?
The Occupation of Time, as I have begun referring to it, has many manifestations in our day to day life, especially when you are involved in building multi-national, interfaith communities. One aspect that I have noticed in particular is the devaluation of time among my Palestinians colleagues to the extent that it has very little meaning to them. When you are under occupation, your time is not your own, and as a result, it no longer holds as much meaning for you. When you leave the house, you don’t know how long it will take you to get to work, how long it will take you to get back. Ahmed and I planned to meet at 11 AM, but all it takes is an 18-year-old kid in a uniform to make that twelve, one o’clock or never.
I remember when I was that 18-year-old kid in a uniform, stationed at a checkpoint just outside of Jenin. The ISA (Shabak) would say ‘we are looking for someone in a red shirt’, and that would be enough to detain anyone who made the unfortunate choice of wearing any shirt that day that featured a little bit of red — this could last for days, even if the culprit had already been apprehended. It was many times, no longer really about security, but rather a tool of Palestinian subjugation. Because when you are Eighteen, you easily succumb to a system that does not see Palestinians as real people, or at least, not people that matter.
I recall one morning back when I was in service, two men were held back, they were driving a silver-blue Subaru, and we were ordered to stop anyone driving such a car. We radioed the ISA, and they said they would send someone. One hour followed another, we radioed them over and over again, and each time received the same answer — ‘someone was on their way’. Six hours later, I was ending my shift, and the two Palestinians were still there. They had been sitting in the sun all day with no food or drink, and no one seemed to care — it wasn’t their time that was being wasted. I went to the dining hall, picked up some food and a bottle of ice-cold Coke from the military market and handed it to them. The men were grateful, but I was fuming. It was clear to me that had they been Jewish; the ISA would have never dared waste their time in such a manner. Finally, around 3 pm, some 9 hours later, the ISA agent arrived — he took one look at the men in our custody and told us to let them go.
“You are not going to check them?” I asked, somewhat surprised.
“No” He replied, “We caught the people we were looking for this morning.”
“And you didn’t think to tell us?” I asked, my voice rising in anger. “These guys have been waiting here all day!”
“So what? What is it to you?” He waved me off casually and walked away.
And now my thoughts were back on Ahmed, stuck at a checkpoint, time no longer under his control, and I started to get mad. True, this has been happening for a long time, but it is only in the last few years, while working at K4P, that I have come to understand just how debilitating this can be for my Palestinian colleagues and community members. Suddenly, I began to appreciate my own time, yes, that very ‘time’ that had always existed in a parallel universe.
At K4P during our winter seminar, I overheard two Palestinian campers discussing checkpoints. They were talking about how long it would take to get to Amman from Ramallah. Six hours from Hizme checkpoint, Nine hours from Kalandia Checkpoint. The kids were calculating a drive that in a world with no borders could be completed in less than an hour. They were not upset about this, they have never known another reality, so the timing seemed quite reasonable to them. Another Jewish advisor who overheard this conversation discussed with me later how heartbreaking it was to see an entire generation growing up not knowing what it is like to have agency over their own time. All this was my food for thought, as I prepared for the Sabbath after our Humus outing.
That evening, as I brought in the Shabbat, I couldn’t help but have the words of Rabbi Joshua Heschel echo through my mind. When I was a teen his teachings on the sanctity of time were hammered into me, his words from then on forever familiar; so that as the sun began to set into the Sabbath and my congregation rose in song, I found myself reciting them, meditating on them — as if they were a prayer:
“Judaism is a religion of time, aiming at the sanctification of time… There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious…
Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time, to be attached to sacred events, to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of a year… The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals, and our Holy of Holies is a shrine that neither the Romans nor the Germans were able to burn…
Jewish ritual may be characterised as the art of significant forms in time, as the architecture of time…
“And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy.” There is no reference in the record of creation to any object in space that would be endowed with the quality of holiness…. When history began, there was only one holiness in the world, holiness in time.
The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week, we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath, we try to become attuned to holiness in time…” [Rabbi Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath]
The congregation around me was singing the Lecha Dodi in joyous voices, singing of a time to come, but I was deep within myself. My Birthday, a celebration of time, had taught me that day a valuable lesson. I was beginning to appreciate how much ‘Time’ meant to me. Time is a blessing, a holy moment so unique, how sacrilegious it is not to consider the time of others. As I meditated my thoughts grew in scope, I thought about Ahmed, about my Palestinian campers discussing checkpoints, about the two innocent men who sat with me at a checkpoint all day — and I began to wonder; How can we as Jews, so attuned to the holiness of time participate in this occupation of time?
If every hour is gifted by the divine, unique and endlessly precious, where do we procure the audacity to plunder it so callously from another of gods creations?
A great Tikkun is required here. An action to fix this spiritual and material reality. Protecting life is essential; the checkpoints have their temporary and limited validity to that end. But our need for borders can never be an excuse to occupying a People and their Time. Borders have often been a place that invited degeneracy; the presence of law will always be needed to protect both those entering and those policing the crossings.
In the ancient world, temples and altars were erected at the border crossing to act as a reminder of the god(s) whose rule all must abide.
Today at the checkpoints, we must create alternatives to these altars that will remind soldiers daily of the sanctity of time, to the constant and recurring realisation that the people they are policing are human beings — their time, sacred!
Heschel spoke of our Sabbath as the great cathedral of ‘time’, a temple that stands at the border of our faith, an eternal reminder of creation and it’s Creator. A reminder of ‘holiness in time’. As we enter another Sabbath, I can only pray that these cathedrals will suffice.
