The pandemic has dramatically disrupted our experience of time. We’ve all had different forms of disruption: lengthy hours of life alone, endless hours of quarantine with small children, the speed of sickness and decline, the length of recovery and post-viral syndromes, waiting for a vaccine, waiting for new variants, waiting for “normalcy,” waiting, waiting, waiting—enduring without knowing what duration we might reference with the term.

Judaism is a “religion of time,” in the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel. What can Jewish thinking about time help us understand about our current conditions, “these times” that have scrambled our sense of time? How can a discussion of time help us think about ethical and political challenges of these times? This series will consider these questions through a few key discussions of time in Jewish thought.