“Counting that is needed for a mitsva – one is not

punished.  Counting that is not needed – one is

punished.”  However, “blessing does not rest except

on what is hidden from the eye.”

Apparently place belongs to the Holy One and time belongs to man – since after all the Creator is above time, yet Hazal call the Holy One “The Place”.  “The Holy One is the Place where the world is, but the world is not His place.”  Place in the sense of permanent.  Time in the sense of changing.   Permanence and mobility.  Permanence answers to the need for belonging.  Freedom – in the sense of mobility and change.

The desert was mobility.  “And they traveled and they camped” by God’s word.  The Ramban distinguishes between the temporary mitsvot that were given in the desert, and the eternal mitsvot that were, it is true, given in the desert, but that was in order to answer the need for preparation, so that they could become rooted in the Land of their destination, in their permanent place, where they would permanently dwell, according to the way the division of the land would be determined, as a heritage for every tribe, according to each tribe’s different characteristics and determining features.

Here we find the subject of permanence, as it arises out of Sefer Bamidbar.  A permanence of each tribe’s place, in order, according to the organization of the desert camps; the permanence of travel and of setting up camp, who was to go before whom, etc.  and each tribe’s permanent place when camping and when travelling.  And above all:  The permanences of the family relationships: “According to their geneologies according to their patriarchal households.” 

It is interesting to note that one might expect the family to supposedly blur the private individual, for after all it comes as a belonging at the expense of freedom; at the expense of the freedom of the individual.  Indeed the whole issue of the two opposing tendencies – freedom and belonging – has no resolution in the world of doing, and it is from this that the contradiction between the tendency toward permanence and the tendency toward mobility derives.  Between commitment and responsibility to one’s duty within the family framework, and the freedom of every individual to do as he chooses. 

The family relationship: Bequeathing land heritages to each tribe, the woman’s passage from her father’s heritage to her husband’s tribe’s heritage.  The entropic mobility of the woman, who requires the permanent belonging of her husband’s tribe and the customs of his clan, is balanced by the fact that Jewish identity is attributed to the mother specifically.  This, despite the fact that in terms of halachic practice and principle, the son is determined by the father and receives his customs: “Every man must uphold the custom of his fathers.”

These two opposite tendencies fit the perfect structure of Torah dynamics: “Two scriptures contradict each other, until the third shall come [this is the dimension of height] and resolve them.”  The dimension of values, of principles, of the Godly imperative, is the single solution offered by the Torah as being adequate to resolve this contradiction – to resolve the problem of the inherent exsistential contradiction that is created as a result of the intrinsically contradictory tendencies out of which human beings are built.

Place – permanence.  Time – mobility.  The Torah determines the place, and leaves the time up to man – for time is one’s expression of free choice – yet it does not allow man to sever place and time.  It forces him to keep place and time connected.

Mitsvot asay shehazman graman, active mitsvot that are time-generated are mitsvot that the Torah has determined, but the Torah gives man the freedom of choice to determine their time.  Asher tikvi’u otam bemo’adan – asher tikvi’u atem et mo’adan.  You yourselves determine their appointed times.  Human beings determine the times of Rosh Hodesh and of the festivals [according to when the moon is first sighted].  However, not their meaningful content – only their time; the mitsvot of counting the omer, the shmita (Sabbatical year) and the yovel (the year that follows the seventh sabbatical year). 

“And she shall count for herself [seven clean days]” – is a reality of time that the Torah places in the woman’s hands.  If  she commences her counting a day later, though her cleanness has commenced a day before, it is her counting of the days that is decisive.  Rather than her bodily condition. 

Any achievement of permanent value is not a place – though superficially, place symbolizes permanence – but rather a time, an unfolding within the gavra, within the subjective human being.  Yet it must be a creative unfolding: One’s intention/will takes control over the reality of the object.  It is this very unfolding that creates the permanence that possesses value.  Therefore it is specifically the counting by the woman – that entropic, liquid creature, who nails down her “liquidity”, and makes of it a fixed permanence through her initiative of counting – it is she who creates the reality that leads to purity…

Shabat is not nature divided by seven.  This number does not exist in nature, which is only divided into day and night and the seasons of the year, but not into weekdays and Sabbath.  Shabat is a creation, yesh mayayin, created out of nothing, being out of non-being, and it is a Divine invention.  Therefore man does not determine the appointed time of Shabat.  But whatever belongs to the New Moon and to the festivals, which reflect and which fit the cyclicity of time and season, these the Torah entrusts to human hands.

From here we learn that Shabat is not merely a view of time but also, and mainly, a view of place.  Of a real and tangible reality, which man is charged with keeping, but not with creating.  Shabat is the center of the essence of the dynamic of creation.  The still and silent pool of water towards which all secular activity is drained, and consolidated.  It is the macah bapatish, the final hammer blow that expresses the completion of the work of the secular days – uniting, consolidating, and encompassing man and universe into a Divine unity. 

From here we learn that a Jew who does not kept Shabat has the same legal status as one who rejects the entire Torah, because he has prevented the unity of creation, leaving it torn and tatttered.

We learn from this that the time factor does not reflect objective reality.  Rather it is a subjective sensation, within the human life force alone, reflecting the nature of an individual’s own relationship to reality.  Only when one bestows one’s own personal, individual intention, by activating one’s own will and opinion, does one bind oneself –  with a bond that obligates – to the place, and only then do one’s actions take on real, objective value. 

Hence “a mitsva requires intent”, and hence a transgression that lacks negative intent remains in the category of oness, One is considered as having been coerced; one is not punished for a transgression one has committed without intention to sin. 

It is interesting to note that the concept of time does not exist among children, nor among primitive adults.  The reference is to pure time.  With the primitive adult and with children, the concept of time is bound to place, to the order and sequence of things – there is before, and after.  Tests on this population for perceptions of pure time show zero results. 

With the sophisticated intellectual, pure time becomes a mathematical concept that roams within his spirit, and is unconnected to any tangible reality.  Mathematicians forget that minor matter, because they are accustomed to relating to the concept of time as to a mathematical substance, which to them is tangible reality.

The Torah found it proper to bring the concept of time nearer to the human brain:  By way of the value-based concept, and by binding it to the concept of the place, of the desert specifically, in which even the place belonged to the value-based universe of Torah and mitsvot, rather than a place having its own character, being already inhabited.

In the desert they discover that only the dimension of height can determine the realness and permanence of things.  External reality does not determine these.  That the birth of all things originates from the source of Torah enables the one who learns and upholds Torah to control the relationships between them and to balance between mobility and permanence, and to endow the reality of time with place, and to join both of them as one, merging and completing them, harmoniously uniting permanence with tangibility. 

This lesson is being given them as an introduction, and as a basic approach, while they journey in the desert.  The lesson is being learned “on empty”, so it seems, as a preparation for their entry into the Land, so that when they would come to the Land, “the mitsvot would not be new in their eyes.”  Meaning that when they come to the land, they will already have in their hands an approach that will enable them to control reality, by way of the dimension of height, and then time and place will become as one in their hands. 

Building the mikdash, as well, “The House of Choice”, would assist them in their approach to reality, in that the mikdash is The (ultimate) Place, being the encounter between matter and spirit, between the permanent and the changing –where time becomes place.