Beach Shabbat August 2025 Losing Time & Creating Holiness

Are you wearing a watch? Do you need an alarm to wake up? Do you have an internal clock?

I cannot sleep without a clock at my bedside. I am completely disoriented if I wake up in the middle of the night and don’t know what time it is. Maybe you’re the same way—or maybe you’re one of those people who naturally wakes up at exactly the right time every morning.

Either way, imagine if time just… disappeared.

That’s exactly what happened to a young French scientist in 1962. 

Michel Siffre went underground in the French Alps with nothing but a tent and a flashlight. His plan? Live like an animal—no clocks, no calendars, no sunrise or sunset. No outside cues about time at all.

He set up a simple system: he’d call his surface team when he woke up, when he ate, and before sleep. But here’s the catch—they couldn’t call him back. He was completely cut off from time.

And then something extraordinary happened.

Every time he called the surface, Siffre did a simple test. He counted from 1 to 120 at what felt like one number per second. This should take exactly two minutes, right?

It took him five.

He was experiencing time at half the speed of the world above. Five real minutes felt like only two. But he had no idea this was happening. In his mind, he was counting perfectly normally.

The real shock came after 63 days underground. When his team told him the experiment was over, Siffre was stunned. According to his careful daily journal, only 35 days had passed. He thought he had an entire month left.

Twenty-five days had simply vanished from his consciousness.

“My psychological time,” he said later, “had compressed by a factor of two.”

This young geologist accidentally discovered something profound: our experience of time can be completely rewritten by our environment. Without external cues, our internal clocks drift away from reality.

Now, I’m pretty sure no rabbis ever went underground to contemplate the nature of time … but our rabbis did spend an inordinate amount of time creating our Jewish calendar. 

You’ve heard me say this before … I am obsessed with the calendar, not just the holidays and seasons, but the magical way the rabbis figured out the merging of the lunar and solar calendars with the leap month so that Passover is always in the spring which it wouldn’t be if we were fully lunar (Ramandan moves throughout the seasons because of this).  

And our rabbis solved these complex calculations long before computers and Chat GPT – and guess what – in 5786 years, there hasn’t been one mistake. 

If that doesn’t sell you on Judaism’s spiritual power then I don’t know what will?!

Judaism realized the power of time—and did something revolutionary with it.

Judaism made a radical choice: we sanctify time itself. We don’t just go to holy places; we create holy moments. Here are some examples:

We have moments of holiness each day: 

We have blessings for rainbows, for thunder, for going to the bathroom. We offer blessings before and after eating. 

We have longer periods of holy time – Shabbat – when we boldly declare – these 25 hours are holy. Nothing from the regular world can touch us now. 

We have our cycle of holidays and we have our cycle of life – both are governed by time. 

Shiva, Shloshim, Yahrzeit all make the mourning process. Grief would be all consuming and too chaotic if we didn’t have Judaism’s wise structure.

In our holiday cycle, we count up to the giving of the Torah in the spring Omer period and we count the 10 days of repentance between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

This is Judaism’s unique genius: instead of seeking escape from time or letting time shift with each person’s unique experience, 

We meet each other in community at our sacred times and we elevate our individual lives with smaller daily moments of holiness like saying blessings and offering thanks.

Siffre lost 25 days in a cave and discovered chaos when time disappeared. 

Judaism does the opposite. Judaism teaches that time isn’t something that happens to us—it’s something we sanctify.

Sunday we enter the month of Elul. 

For an entire month, we transform ordinary days into a spiritual countdown. Every morning the shofar sounds—a daily alarm clock for the soul, reminding us  that time remains for change.

Elul opens the door to what we might call “sacred urgency.” 

Not the frantic rush of deadline pressure, but the focused intensity of knowing that every day matters. Elul is a special gift, a unique time period to attend to our spiritual needs. 

We don’t just wait for Rosh Hashanah to arrive—we actively prepare for it, day by day, moment by moment.

As we enter Elul, the sacred month of renewal, we can ask: What kind of time are we creating?