Redeeming the Time, Rabbinically

Reading from a Torah scroll in accordance with Sephardi tradition. Photo: Sagie Maoz via Wikimedia Commons.

We live in a culture that is very good at avoiding ultimate questions. Death is kept offstage. Time is treated as infinite. The modern self is trained to strive, consume, showcase, curate, and distract, but not often to reckon. The deepest matters are postponed, not necessarily out of malice, but out of habit: there is always another headline, another obligation, another performance of busyness.