I don’t know about your newspaper, but in ours there’s a daily listing of the birthdays of celebrities. I usually play the game with Suzy entitled, “How old do you think ___is?” She’s pretty good at guessing; sometimes she hits it on the head. What we’ve noticed though is that there’s going to be a time in the (not-so-distant) future when we just won’t recognize the names of those celebrities. The list on the top gets shorter; the younger ones – actors and musicians – might be recognizable by our kids but we hardly heard of them, if at all.
The funny thing is that when you try to tell the youngins’ who the older ones are, all you get is that glassy-eyed look. “No, I never heard of that (black-and-white) movie,” “I don’t care what award she won,” etc. To us and our friends it was like yesterday that together we sat in the theater and saw this movie or that play. To our children it would be comparable to our parents reminiscing with their friends, “Remember when we went to Toots Shor’s and then to the Roxy?” As “they” say, “Time flies when you’re having fun!”
That time flies is no lie; better stated, time doesn’t fly, we just get old. Someone told me there’s actually a mathematical formula that ties time and age, but I digress, for a change.
In Massei, the weekly Torah portion, forty-two stops made by the Children of Israel are outlined. Relating this to her own life, one commentator (Rabbi Shefa Gold) states,
As each stage of a journey comes to an end, we pull up our stakes and move on, initiating a new adventure. At each stage of the journey I become aware of my own transformation. I’m never the same adventurer who set forth the last time.
We might recall the personalities entertaining those generations behind ours yet our children might never have heard about our favorite singers, songs, movies or plays, yet we have to remember that the nature of history and the nature of humanity is such that events and players impact on each other. They make a permanent impression for the time…and there is an accumulation of impressions with new players step by step by step.
Did Moses know his people would get to the Promised Land when he set out from Egypt? No. Did he even know they would find a wall of water leading them to freedom? No. Or be given so magnificent a gift as Torah? No. Just as there were stops along the way to the ultimate goal, biblical journeys outlined in Massei, there are stops along the way of our lives. We don’t know what they are; we’re usually able to pause, then pull up our stakes and move on. Nevertheless, they can mean something for future generations. Our job is to give them some bit of meaning and posit some influence, then move on. And so it goes.
(Speaking of journeys, two ancient Israelites were traveling through the wilderness, experiencing the same travails as the other 600,000. They stopped for a snack, sitting under the sun for what seemed like hours. The first Israelite said, “Oy, vay!” The second one looks at the first and says, “You’re telling me!”)