Judaism
Keep a watch on your priorities
Rabbi Adam Edwards discusses how to make the best out of your life now rather than later
August 23, 2018 14:23
Rabbi Adam Edwards discusses how to make the best out of your life now rather than later
August 23, 2018 14:23The Tikker is a wristwatch with a difference. As well as telling the time, the Tikker has a countdown feature, showing its wearer the number of years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds they have left to live. Before wearing the watch, its owner must fill out a questionnaire with information about their medical history, lifestyle choices, allergies and illnesses. The company then deducts their current age from the results, so that the Tikker can begin an automated life expectancy countdown until the time that it predicts the owner will die.
The Tikker’s creator, Swedish inventor Fredrik Colting, says he came up with the idea of a “death watch” after his grandfather died. He realised nothing matters once you are dead — what matters is how you make the most of the time as long as you are alive. So far from being morbid, he calls it The Happiness Watch and claims it has been designed to help people both make the most of their life and cherish the time they have left.
There are many beautiful explanations as to why we blow the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, but one of the most powerful and evocative is that of Maimonides (1135-1204). For Maimonides, the shofar is God’s alarm clock, waking us up from the “slumber”in which we spend our days. What does he mean by this?
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks once said: “God’s greatest gift to us is time and he gave it to us on equal terms”. I believe Lord Sacks meant no matter how rich or poor we are, no matter how old, no matter how intelligent, no matter our job or our title, we still have only 24 hours in a day, seven days a week and a span of years that is all too short.
Often we spend time on things that in the words of Maimonides “neither help nor save”. How many people look back on their lives and say: “I wish I had spent more time at the office?”. By contrast, how many say “I wish I had spent more time with my family, being involved with my community and doing acts of kindness and charity?”
Sometimes we can be so busy making a living that we actually forget to live. As John Lennon once famously sang, “Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans”.
Time-management experts talk about two types of activity: the urgent and the important. This concept was popularised by Stephen Covey in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, but it was actually used by American president Dwight D. Eisenhower, long before Covey made it famous.
The key message is that often our days are spent on the urgent and we lose sight of the important. When this happens, we can end up focusing on work, on the office and on our phones while losing sight of our family, community and our desire to better the world.
Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are when we number our days. As we ask to be written in the book of life, we think about time and how we use it and we think about life and how we use it.
The Tikker watch is a modern and innovative way of teaching us this vital concept. But the shofar itself has always taught us this timeless message. The shofar wakes us up: when we hear it, it shakes us to our core, rousing us from our slumber. It pleads with us to remember time is our most precious commodity and urges us to make the most of it as long as we are alive. The shofar makes us question and assess our priorities in life and ultimately reminds us that life is short, life is fragile and the time to do what is important is now.
Rabbi Adam Edwards is senior Seed educator
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