Transcending Limits

The Biblical books of Exodus through Joshua describe how, in the Iron Age, the Jewish people began to give up their nomadic lifestyles and settle in cities. They learned how to forge iron into plows that could till the rocky soil of the Middle East, allowing humankind to raise crops in sufficient quantities to settle in one location, and were no longer required to forage from place to place for food. Humankind was no longer at the whim of sun, wind, and very occasional rain. Instead, a measure of control of one's life and one's environment had been achieved.

The protective space of the city was extended in Numbers, chapter 35, where the Levites, lacking land holdings in Israel, are granted forty-eight cities scattered throughout the land of the other tribes. Their grant included a "migrash," that is, an area of 2000 square cubits (approximately 3-4000 square feet) stretching in all directions from the border of the city. It served to pasture the flocks in Biblical times and then developed, as recorded in the Talmud, into an environmentally protected area in later Jewish history.

Each city constituted a blow for civilization and against the desert. But the "migrash" that extends our city reminds us that there is more to do and that the benefits of civilization in its best sense must be extended to all.

Jews built sanctuaries of space in cities and sanctuaries of time in their holidays--and then went about expanding those temporal boundaries. The Day of Atonement falls on the tenth of the month of Tishrei, but the fast exceeds its natural time-frame and must begin on the ninth. The shofar, the ram's horn, is associated with the first day of the Jewish year, but is blown each morning for thirty days before the Jewish New Year. The day after major holidays is considered a minor festive occasion. In this way, the message of each holiday is not cut short by its boundary on the calendar.

So too did the Rabbis extend one's personal space. The area within four cubits (six-eight feet) of a person is considered part of him or her. In some cases, an object within that distance around people will be considered legally theirs simply because it has entered their territory.

When taken together, space, time, and civilization remind us of something even more fundamentally human. Jewish law allows our body to extend past its physical limits, requires our most sacred holidays to transcend the limits of time, and instructs us to extend our cities, outposts of civilization, to overspread their boundaries. In this way, we enshrine in all dimensions of human experience something fundamentally human--the need to transcend. To be human is to want to go beyond, to touch the sky, to climb the mountains, to cross the sea, to walk on the moon. America too was founded by such a vision, and the dream of reaching beyond gives us all reason to do our work today and to hope for an even better tomorrow.