The Late Jewish People
Israel, Richard J.
THE LATE JEWISH PEOPLE RICHARD J. ISRAEL Shmaryahu Levin, the Zionist teacher and orator, once said that he spent his entire life trying to come late to a Jewish meeting without ever succeeding....
...Rabbi Baeck may have done an admirable thing, but it is somewhat terrifying to contemplate what Jewish life would be like if all prompt Richard J. Israel is executive director of the Hillel Council of Greater Boston...
...I get the fidgets when I arrive at an airplane more than a minute or two before the plane door closes...
...Annoyed with the lateness of the rest of the members, who were ostensibly prompt Germans, and having a pet project that he wanted to support, Baeck proposed that the lodge fund the publication of the Buber/ Rosenzweig translation of the Bible...
...Everyone else's lives would be thrown into pandemonium...
...It can be a real issue...
...Baeck reported that two good things came of that brief meeting: a magnificent Bible translation was published-and no one ever came late to a lodge meeting again...
...The rest of us chatted informally in the living room...
...I am told that black people, when speaking among themselves, may refer to Colored People's Time, and in some circles even talk about Old Colored People's Time (i.e...
...They wrote the check, funded the translation and adjourned the meeting...
...Mischa didn't have our address and couldn't have found us...
...It is not quite clear to me whether my wife's family and mine come from different ethnic time zones or if her family just overdosed on the Scandinavian Midwest during the many years they lived there...
...Under the current system, the only issue for the rest of us is to be sure that our general measure of lateness is set to the same standard...
...And even the Germans are not always punctilious about clock time, at least not if they are German Jews...
...people took such radical steps while waiting for the others to arrive...
...He clearly accepted the widely held view that there is such a thing as Jewish Standard Time...
...I hate it when people actually come at precisely the time they have been invited...
...We included pictures of our friend Mischa...
...Unhappily, each ethnic time must be factored differently...
...Finally, at 7:45, an hour and 45 minutes after our announced time, Mischa and his family arrived...
...The problem is that we now live in a pluralistic society and we have no shared standard of lateness...
...Would he and his family please come and join us for a Shabbat dinner...
...The point is that neither do anyone else's...
...My wife reset the table withoutsaying a word...
...they don't...
...At first we expected some kind of exp^ nation or apology, but then we realized that so far as they were concerned there was nothing amiss...
...Even though they were young, they had evidently learned far more about the responsibil ities of hosts than I had suspected...
...As I remember the story, he told of how he arrived promptly, as always, at a meeting of the B'nai B'rith lodge of which he was president...
...We were delighted with the news and immediately tracked him down...
...Well, almost anyone's...
...It is not that Jewish events universally start when they are announced...
...It is possible to stay up all night in sweaty anxiety to be sure you will arrive precisely at clock time for a very important appointment, only to discover that the person you are to meet doesn't keep clock time...
...The only tense moment of the evening came when Mischa commented on how.curious it was that our robust-looking children had such modest appetites...
...A standardized margin of free time would be a great boon to us all because if you don't know your guest's or your host's ethnic time factor, you can be the cause of-or be caused-great embarrassment...
...His most recent article in these pages was "My Friend GorelickAnd The Angel Of Death" (September 1984...
...I find it a great effort to be ready at clock time...
...Woody Allen describes a planet in another galaxy where the civilization is more advanced than ours-by 15 minutes...
...It is my conviction that the notion of Jewish Standard Time is essentially a canard...
...If everyone arrives at the same late time, or if people expect you to arrive when you do, you are not late, irrespective of the time that has been announced...
...We would sit down to eat at 6:00...
...Only he and the treasurer of the lodge were present at the time formally designated for beginning the meeting...
...If you have candid informants, you can learn about how people view their own group's time sense...
...Temporal intermarriages" have to bear a heavy strain...
...Both he and we were delighted at the prospect...
...When everything was back in place, we in-vited the children and they came to th( table without a hint about the peculiarities of the situation...
...But intercultural time conflicts can occasionally bring out the best in us...
...My wife and I had met a refusenik mathematician in Leningrad, a charming man who had been trying to get out of Russia for a long time...
...When almost an hour had passed and Mischa had not come, we could no longer prevent our children from falling apart...
...If one of the parties is forever on German time while the other is on Polish time, they both feel put upon with great frequency...
...The Swedes, like the Germans, follow clock time...
...My wife used to be ready early, but there are signs that I may be succeeding in adjusting her time standard...
...We never told him...
...One of my most treasured family memories, an incident that caused me to be extraordinarily proud of my wife and children, happened because we did not know enough about Russian time...
...The treasurer assented...
...We finished dinner and cleared the table...
...My wife, on the other hand, is a nervous wreck if we don't get to sit in the waiting room at least 10 or 15 minutes before the plane starts to board...
...At one lecture, someone in the audience said, "He isn't in Leningrad, he is in Boston...
...When we returned to Boston, we went on the circuit for a while and gave slide-lectures about the Jewish families with whom we had visited...
...That extra 15 minutes prevents people from having to rush to get to appointments on time...
...I am frequently rewarded for my arrival time by being forced to sit in first class, since my tourist seat has been given away...
...We sat down to eat, having given up on our guests...
...We had a lovely Shabbat dinner together...
...The Germanic descendants of the Angles and the Saxons and occasional eccentrics among other ethnic groups do, and that tends to intimidate the rest of us...
...Similarly, there is Italian Time, Polish Time, and a whole host of other ethnic times that are measures of the interval between when an event is announced and when people are actually expected to appear...
...African Time, which is a bit later than ordinary Colored People's Time...
...That fact used to exasperate Leo Baeck, the distinguished rabbi of the Berlin Jewish community, who recounted an attempt he made to re-set Jewish time to clock time...
...At the time, our four children ranged in age from seven to thirteen...
Vol. 10 • March 1985 • No. 3
