25 Elul: A T’shuvah for the After Days

We all understand that our individual efforts to improve ourselves (t’shuvah) will fall short of solving the climate crisis. Our society, after many decades of avoiding disruptive, transformative change, must act drastically to ratchet back the worsening environmental devastation.

It is tempting, in our culture, to associate an eschatological “end of days” scenario with disaster as well as with salvation. We should not overdramatize our situation and call down God’s rage; that will not help us move society toward the necessary action. But it’s interesting to see the various uses made in the Jewish Bible of the “end of days” concept, expressed in Hebrew as “b’aḥarit hayamim.”

The word “b’aḥarit” is a subtle one. Its root, “aḥar,” means both “other” and “after.” It’s the opposite of “b’reishit,” the word that begins Genesis and is traditionally translated as “in the beginning.”

I like to translate “b’aḥarit” as “afterness” and see “b’aḥarit hayamim” as a radical disconnection from the past. The word “hayamim,” which means “the days,” indicates a period of time.

Thus, the entire phrase suggests both something that’s very different from our current society and a new phase of society that leaves the current one behind.

Physicists say that before the Big Bang, there was not only no universe but no time. Eschatologists suggest that “b’aḥarit hayamim” will be another Big Bang that brings time to an end. The peace of Shabbat will always rein.

What does time have to do with our environmental problems? To fix them, we have to stop prioritizing efficiency and maximizing our use of time. We can’t try to extract every bit of resources from the Earth, faster and faster, as we’re doing now.

The phrase “b’aḥarit hayamim” appears about a dozen times in the Bible, usually heralding a Golden Age of peace and justice (Isaiah 2:2, Ezekiel 38:16, Hosea 3:5, Micah 4:1, Daniel 2:28, Daniel 10:14). Christians built on this hope, but the Jewish aftertime does not entail the destruction of our world—rather its unification under ideal conditions.

Incidentally, the Jews are not the only ones who can look forward to “b’aḥarit hayamim”: It can refer to the restoration of other peoples, such as Moab (Jeremiah 48:47) or Elam (Jeremiah 49:39).

Furthermore, “b’aḥarit hayamim” intersects with t’shuvah. In one part of Deuteronomy (verse 4:30), the phrase indicates when the children of Israel will reconnect with God, an early concept of t’shuvah. T’shuvah reappears in Hosea 3:5, where the children of Israel ask for God in days to come–”b’aḥarit hayamim.”

When we are ready to give up our frenetic pace of living; when we are ready for development to serve the Earth and its people rather than the reverse; when we are ready to enter into a different relationship with time—then we will do the t’shuvah we need to save the planet. And we will all prosper under this anotherness of days.

September 17, 2023

Andy Oram is a writer and editor in the computer field. He also writes often on health IT, on policy issues related to the Internet, and on trends affecting technical innovation and its effects on society. Print publications where his work has appeared include The Economist, Communications of the ACM, Copyright World, the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Vanguardia Dossier, and Internet Law and Business. He has lived in the Boston, Massachusetts area for more than 30 years and is a member of Temple Shir Tikvah, Winchester, Mass.