The Shul's Blog

God told Moses that he would strike dead the first born of Egypt “in the middle of the night.” Moses told Pharaoh that God would strike at “about the middle of the night,” so that Pharaoh would not object after the plague had passed that it was not brought by God since God’s timeline was wrong.

The clear fact, at least to us, is that nobody knew when the ‘middle of the night’ was back then. The clock was not to be invented for another three thousand years. Consequently no one had any true way to determine time when night fell. In Tractate Berachot there is an argument that the night has four watches. If that was so, that would mean that the second of the four watches had to end exactly at midnight. The rabbis asked how one could tell when midnight arrived. They could only answer by miracle. Precisely at midnight, when King David would arise, a wind would blow over the harp that was hung over his bed, and would play a certain tune. A miracle was necessary to answer a problem that could not be answered by logic or invention.

For most of history people had trouble telling and describing time. They did not know what a second or even a minute was. They only had a subjective view of an hour. People could not live by the clock. They did not have calendars filled with appointments.

Life was slower then; it went at a leisurely pace. When we began to make inventions during the industrial age, life quickened. With every advance life became faster and faster. Today we know what a nano-second is, and we live by the second. The night is no longer an amorphous time of blackness, but is delineated by the watch or the more perfect iphone that has taken its place.

The telephone, telegraph, train and later jet plane are only emblematic of the speed at which life is quickening.