Transcript
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...trying to make you feel a certain sensation in your viscera about the period preceding the coming of Christ. That is, from the destruction of Troy, and from the leaving of Egypt by Moses, to the coming of Christ, there is a period that deserves to be treated as a unity, as putting a question to the empires and the tribes: where they would be going, what the future would be.
There is a battle, or a constant warfare in this -- in these -- century, whether the -- tribes can invade the empires, or whether the empires will swallow up the tribes. And it is very hard for the living, for the contemporaries of King David or Homer to understand that the Greeks and the Jews are holding a position of compromise, of mediation, between the Egyptian and Persian empires on the one-hand side, and the tribal traditions of the little group on the other. You have not been brought up with any idea that the times are in tension, that people expect things. You may expect the arrival of the next airplane, or the nuclear explosion. But the expectations of modern man are really very restricted and very unimportant. Your expectations do not comprise the next 500 years, and therefore they are of no significance.
The ancients were in a very different position. They expected something to come long, far ahead. They had more time than you have. You have no time, and therefore you are barbarians. I cannot talk to a civili- -- man today as I could even 400 years before, because -- 400 years ago, people expected achievements for -- centuries to come. You only ex- -- expect the next nuclear explosion. That's nothing to expect. Go home, and be bombed right away. Why wait?
The lack of expectation is the strangest thing of the modern scientific world. The reason for this is that scientists have no proper relation to time. A physicist has no relation to time. He treats it as a thing. And he treats it therefore as something computable. Now the Jews -- are the one nation of antiquity which you today need every day in order to get the feeling of what time really is. And this is my topic today. If I succeed--I'm not sure that I can--to explain to you why this Jewish element permeates everything in -- in your daily existence to -- to this day, then I can leave antiquity behind, and we can turn to the last 2,000 years of our era, to the coming-about of the Christian Church, the coming-about of a natural world, and the preparation of the famous Great Society of which Mr. Johnson is the herald.
These three things: world, Church, and society--all three are expressions that exclusively belong to our era. There was no meaning to the word "Church" in the year 500 B.C. There was no meaning to the word "world," before there
were astronauts, or before there was physics. And therefore -- and--let alone the Great Society--that was unknown. So there are certain products of our own era, to which we ha- -- will have to turn to explain to you what we are striving for, what you can achieve, or what you cannot achieve when you pick out your wife or when you pick out a profession. You are very limited on this very small spaceship of the earth. But in antiquity, the feeling for the reality of time was better developed than today for the simple reason that the Jews had invented the dynamite to explode the Great Year of Egypt. They had invented the Sabbath.
The Sabbath is the most revolutionary unit in calendar -- dealing with the calendar, because it defies the year: the Great Year and this individual year. If you look on December 30th into a calendar of today, you take it for granted that January the 3rd will be five days later in the week as January -- as December 30th. This of course was quite impossible in Egypt, or in Persia, or for any -- in any ancient calendar, because the -- Little Day, or the 10-day unit, the decade, or whatever you had in smaller units were governed by the larger unit. And therefore, when a new year came, you had to start all over again.
The Jews, with the gesture typical of them, brushed it aside and said, "My little week rolls on. If we had Friday on the -- December 30th, then we have Friday on January 5th. I can't alter this. I can't go back because of the New Year and begin a new count of the week. My week outshines the Great Year, the 1460 years of the pyramids."
This is a very little gesture, gentlemen. But to this day, you are a free agent of God only because you have not the planetary week of antiquity but the week which begins again every Sunday--or in the Jewish reckoning, every Sabbath, which makes no difference in this respect. The funny thing is that this perpetual, rolling-on of the weeks frees you and me from astrology. The simple fact that the week is sovereign, and that the stars--Venus, and -- Jupiter, and what have you, and the moon--can do as they please, and not interfere with your and my calendar, puts all human beings on this earth who follow this order on the side of the creator, and against the creatures.
Down in -- Egypt, you would be a part of creation, and you -- because you would fall in with the planets, and with the days -- -by-day meaning of the constellation in the sky.
In the Christian and in the Jewish week, which you take for guaranteed, gentlemen, you would have this immediately if every New Year you would begin to change the week, and would begin with January 1st, you see, as the beginning also of your week. You don't. Because your week is sovereign over all these constellations in the sky. What does it matter what Jupiter says, or Venus in
the sky? You are sovereign. Your week is when you meet your girl again on the weekend.
The freedom of men is guaranteed by your freedom of astrology. And you don't know how -- precious and how rare this is. Other nations don't have this. The Chinese are still under astrological spell. And when they introduce the western calendar, they become Christians, or Jews, whatever you have. We have certainly people of the Bible. Because the beginning of the Bible has instituted the Sabbath. As you know, God created the world in seven days.
Now to you this may show -- still -- today they have treated this as myth, and they have treated this as scientific nonsense, and they have measured it up to the id- -- idea of Mr. Einstein, or Mr. Beinstein, or Mr. Kleinstein. But this has nothing to do with the intention of the biblical story. The biblical story has -- is an attempt to make you comprehend time--future, as well as past--in one breath. For this, they had to reduce time to limits, to units which you and I can breathe, because time is breathed in and breathed out. There is no other way for your comprehending time. No mathematics can tell you what time is. That's all nonsense what these mathematicians tell you about time. They are all wrong about everything they think they know about time, because they try to stare at time from the outside. But you know very well what it means to wait for a letter a whole week.
The -- and only by knowing what it means to wait for something and to look back and forget something, because it is all so -- long ago, do we know anything about time. The idea of these scientists that they can know of -- about time -- from books, or from reddening, or configurations is just ridiculous. The only way in which you and I know of time is desire, and fear, and expectation, and trembling. And in fear and trembling, we can know very well what the future and what the past mean.
Now the grandeur of the Bible story is that in seven days, God created Heaven and earth so that you can still, at the end of the creative act, have the feelings for the first act. And vice versa: while the first act comes to pass, you have a feeling for its finiteness, for its completion, for its perfection. Every one of us is in a -- condition, since the -- Genesis was written to encompass the whole width of time from beginning to end. And without this, you cannot participate in God's work. In order to be a creature of your -- God in such a way that you can say, "I am His creature," you cannot understand anything about His time process.
We are in history, thanks to this planet -- to this strange rule that the week rolls on, regardless of the stars; and overrules the constellations in the sky.
It is very strange that this has disappeared today, you may think. And don't I invent this? Now I can only tell you that the whole thousand years before the coming of Christ, the fight against the -- this week of the Jews has filled the studies of the Greeks and Egyptian priests, and the astronomers. They hated this freedom from the extra, mun- -- the mundane time, the natural time. They didn't want to give us this participation in the creative process, that we could know when something was completed and perfected, or when something was started. They say, "We neither know of starting, nor of completion. It's just rolling on, rolling on, rolling on."
Read your astronomy books. They are so tiresome, you see, because everything is just going on all the time. There are no Sabbaths; God never rests. The -- the in- -- incredible -- impertinence of this little Jewish nation was: that surrounded by its enemies, always conquered, always threatened, they say, "But we are on the side of the creator." And the creator is perfectly free to look at this -- country called Palestine, or these -- island of Cyprus, or this island of Crete, or these mountains in -- around Delphi, and the Olympus, and say, "Well, that's all over now. Now I turn to something else. I enjoy myself in eternal leisure." This invention of the holy day is a Jewish invention.
To show you this very practically: when Christ came and regenerated the ancient world, there were 46 holidays in Rome. And the fathers of the Church pointed this out and said, "Look at the Jews. They have hundreds of holidays, because they are on the side of God. And you people, you have not even -- 52 holidays. Every Jew has 52 Sabbaths. You only have 46 official Roman church -- or Roman temple holidays."
The poverty of humanity, you see, without the week, is quite startling. Because there are very few inventions. There is the equinox, which you would have celebrated in antiquity, you see, because it is a very clear and concise vision of the equality of night and day, on -- in March and in September. So therefore, there were a few such astronomical holidays. But otherwise, the -- the mere flux of time gives no man any pause. You cannot say that you have experienced anything if you are just inside of it.
Will you kindly recall that I began this course with a report from Concord, New Hampshire? There is a monument erected to the dead of the Civil War. And I s- -- read to you the inscription of this monument, which says, "To the memory of the dead of the Civil War," and that was all. And that is no memorial, because the people who d- -- gave it are forgotten. They are not there to speak to us. They just inscribe the stones: the dead are forgotten, because the people who did this are forgotten. There is no subject, no carrier of the message to us. And so it's a tragic monument. It's an attempt to stem the tide of time, and it's in vain. All the
authors with their book-writing, you see, whi- -- in which they print then 1964, you see--now 1967: next year, you don't buy the book; it's obsolete. Now what kind of a book is this for the reason obsolete because it is one year old? But you wait for the next book. And so, even book production in this country--that is, the life --- alleged life of the so-called spirit, is drawn into this maelstrom of constant change.
For the Jews this was quite impossible, because they are the nation of the Bible. And that is -- they is -- they are the people of one single book through all time. And this makes all the difference between Israel and the rest of the world. The rest of the world has literature. The Jews have no literature, because they have transformed their literature into the breathing experiences of their creator. On the first day He created this; on the second day He created this; and now He's dealing with the -- the recalcitrant remnants of the human race. But you can place them. They are inside the creative process in a definite place. And since they are in a definite place, you understand what's going on. There is something before which makes sense, and there is something afterwards which makes sense.
The tribes, of course, had tried to do the same with their burials. Any funeral is an attempt to give you rest, to say "This is over, and this is beginning." But you just look at your own behavior at funerals, and during funerals, and you know that you have lost all breathing spells. You don't know anything that has -- has been completed or perfected. And therefore nothing is ever perfected. You just erect the next factory, and the next highway, and the next real estate development. So there are no real developments, because -- and any development would have come to an end, and would -- be -- have to be -- have to stand there. Your life is very funny. If you observe yourself, you are racing against time and with time.
The old people in Yucatan did the same. They were Egyptians in the true sense. Every 52 years, the constellation of Venus had to be depicted in a stone -- monument in Yucatan. You can still see them there. I recommend it to you to go there, because these poor people, like the Egyptians, were chasing the dog's tail constantly. They wanted to run in competition with time. Venus had these constellations -- these -- every 52 years. And the Yucatan princes were very anxious to prove that they could run as well. So every 52 years, they established a monument in honor of Venus, of course probably sacrificing some hundred people in -- her honor. And so, being most satisfied that they had caught -- stolen a march on Venus, you see. Who wouldn't like to steal a march on Venus?
But they are poor pagans, and very benighted. And most of you live exactly in this same manner. Of course, astrology is the -- is the most furious ex- -- in-
-- token of in this peacelessness, this restlessness.
Let's look at this Jewish problem from a -- from a more daily -- day-by-day po- -- case. I had a friend, a great doctor in Frankfurt am Main in Germany, who was of Jewish descent, and had a Dutch wife and six children. And when the Nazis threatened to annihilate all the Jews in Germany, he decided to dis- -- to flee to Russia. Since he was a great bourgeois, a very wealthy man, and certainly had not one Marxist idea in his head, it was quite an undertaking. He could not pretend that he was a Communist, or that he wanted to be a Communist. Nothing less than he wanted to be. But he had to fight for his life, and for his family.
And so he went -- first to Belgium, and from Brussels he fled by airplane to Warsaw, Poland, which still existed at that time, and--this was just before the Second World War, and I had lost track of him completely at that time. I didn't know where he was. And he went to the Russian authorities and said, "Here I am. I'm not a Communist. But I'm a good doctor. Perhaps you have some use for -- for me." And they sent him to the Caucasus into an -- Essentuki, which is a bathing spa, a resort town in the Caucasus.
And in 1946, I received a letter from him for the first time in -- well, 18 years; I heard from him. And he wrote that he had just held a service with the -- peasants of the environment, in the Caucasus, because they had been converted to Judaism several hundred years before, and kept very faithfully their services, their Jewish services, and so he had conducted them. Quite a story.
And the great verse which they had -- he had to interpret -- that day to him was: should He, who has created the eye, not be able to see us? Very simple, and very surprising. If you are an evolutionist and think you know something of nature, you are perfectly satisfied if you use this glib phrase, "Nature has done so," and you think that's an explanation even. And this idiocy is now dominating in this country: "Nature has done so." Well, what is nature? Nature is your own zero. There is no nature, obviously. That's an invention of laziness, and stupidity, and atheism. But to say that He who has created your eye obviously also must see you and what you're doing with these eyes, is a very normal thing. Because the power that has given you eyesight probably must be superior to yourself. And nature isn't; is without any wisdom, without any aim, without any goal.
Now the creator knows why He has given you this eye. And now comes the miracle, or the surprise, or the solution, you see: and He expects you to use this eye in the same way in which He has created it and given it to you. And woe to you if you don't use it in this manner. Because only from Him can you learn for what you should use your eye. And so your other limbs: your mind, your brain, your beauty, your youth, your old age, whatever it is -- obviously, these
things created into you have to be used by you right. So the prescription for their use and the fact that they have been created are one and the same vision.
If you say that God has created the world in seven days, you are suddenly rid of all the nine-tenths of idiotic philosophies -- -phers, who want to know what this is for, dividing it, separating it from why it is. You cannot. What is here has at the same time the meaning of existence and the meaning of purpose. That's one and the same thing. My dear child, you are here not to become a harlot, but to become a spouse. This is in your being at this moment, although it may take 10 years before the right man turns up.
Therefore the future and the past in the -- Jewish doctrine are indivisible, inseparable. And that's the meaning of the Sabbath. The Sabbath is so short, and condenses the idea of time in such a short period of seven days, you see, that even a child can encompass this. Only professors can't.
The -- your creation, Sir, and your purpose are one and the same thing. You aren't sitting here and study to learn -- why you are for. You are here for the glory of God from the first day in the cradle to the last day in the grave. And if you omit this, you become absolutely impenetrable by truth. Because the truth is that the beginning and the end are one and the same thing. They are indivisible.
Now the -- the genius of the Jewish tradition is: the shortness of this minimum element of timing, if you put it in 2,000 years' units, your and my breath would not be able to encompass it, to breathe it, you see. But since I speak of this moderate size of seven days, which even a student can remember, it is possible to sow into your existence meaning, and sow exis- -- meaning into the existence of the human race, and sow existence even in the meaning of California. Elections going one way or the other, it doesn't matter. You can outlast them.
Now this had to be created, and invented, and that is the contribution of the Jewish calendar, and of the Jewish Bible story to this day, that only through the Jews are you superior to hor- -- the horoscope and to astrology. Any other way leads you into the -- into the thicket of Pythagoreans, Egyptians, Babylonians, Chaldeans, and all the columns in the paper who are paid for -- for this nonsense of the astrology.
It is so simple that once you have understood it, you can't get rid of it, because we -- you can free yourself of this superiority, you see, that you know that the end and the beginning are one. This no physicist knows. Mr. Laplace, who was allegedly a great physicist in 1800--perhaps he was; but in -- to my mind, he is -- was one of the most stupid men who has ever lived--this man
Laplace--contemporary of -- of Kant, and -- the great naturalist of 1800--has said that the past and the future -- and the present beget the future.
And this goes through all the classical textbooks of natural science to this day. It's the greatest nonsense and the greatest bunk that has ever been pronounced. Gentlemen, what the present is, is the clash between future and past. Therefore nobody knows anything of the present, except that he knows what's to happen tomorrow, and he knows what happened yesterday. You can speak of tomorrow and of yesterday, and then say, "Today is the time between the two." But present is a consequence of your believing in future and past. It does not produce the future. This is the -- strict heresy in which I find 889 people of 900 in this state of California believe this nonsense. But it is nonsense, just the same. There is no present before there is a future. You cannot ma- -- understand yourself what you mean by "present," unless there is this conflict between the next moment, you see, after you, and the last moment before you. Present is in itself a presentation of the conflict between past and future.
But the very words "past" and "future" to the Jews are heresies. It is an abstraction to speak of "the" past, and "the" future as though they existed outside you. You are allowed in a physics Labor to speak of the past experiment and the future experiment and look at it from the outside and feel very superior to these dead things which you have arranged and which now operate in some form until they explode and stink.
This is not our real relation to time. You know very well that you must die. You know very well that at one time you have been born. And you dread your death. And all this abstraction, as though you were indifferent to your dying is just hocus-pocus. -- The -- the attitude of the academic person is that death is not to be discussed. I'm quite indifferent to this, you see, quite indifferent. So "as old as Methuselem" is the most idiotic outcome of this, you see. Bernard Shaw of course was a typical rationalist of the -- last century. And he wrote this--or did he? or who was it? "old as Methuselem"? No, That's H. G. Wells. It's equally bad.
Your and my knowledge of life begins with fear of death. We know of ourselves, because we don't want to die. Nobody wants to die. Even the suicide man wants only to die when he says so, and not before. And -- you see, I've seen many people come into life, who wanted to commit suicide, because when they are really threatened with murder, or execution, then they fight for their life like wild men.
We are connected, we are rooted in time by our desire to master the time, to survive it. And it is this fear of death which precedes any knowledge of time,
which these physicists pretend to have. I know of time, because I want to be there the next minute, too. And it is this fear of death which gives me a deep impregnation, a deep impression of the importance of time. We know of time only because we care for the future. Then we can look quietly back into the past because it doesn't threaten us anymore. I can say, "Yesterday I have survived; therefore, what of it? That's the past." So the experience of Israel is that God is in coming. Tomorrow He comes in His creation and judgment. I look back, and He -- I say, "But He has saved me before; may do it again." So the past is the -- result of your having the courage to face the future. It's all the other way around what -- from what the physicists say.
Now this wouldn't help us if not for the last 2,000 years, by Auschwitz and similar pogroms, the Jews had survived and had stated their creed very simply in these terms, that since God is creating the world, anything that has been crated -- created already or beforehand, has direction, has meaning, has destination. And that therefore yesterday's sun is still expected to shine tomorrow. So the sun of tomorrow is older in my mind, for my mind, for my intellect, than the -- sun of yesterday, of which I wouldn't know anything. I wasn't even born yesterday. But I assume that since I hope the sun to be shining tomorrow, she has already shone before.
This is -- every child knows this. But if you go to a university or to college today, you lose your mind. You lose all understanding of time, because all they ask you to do is understand space, you see. And you -- carry over, you transfer all your notions of space left -- right, up, down, north, west, east, to s- -- time. You cannot. Time is not to be had outside your own heartbeat. Your heart gives the time. You must be alive. A dead man knows nothing of time. And physics, of course, is an attempt to treat you -- your own mind as a dead matter, to be weighed and to be measured. And so it's very boring. I mean, would you like to be an astronaut? I can't imagine that anybody would like to do that. -- What -- what is more boring than to go to one of these places in Florida and to be shot into the air? Terrible -- absolute -- it's the end of mankind. It is. It's a very wise way of preparing our undoing.
But with humanity or with anything interesting, it has nothing to do. And a -- when a whole nation like this one is plunging for this, you see, and is killing the Vietnamese just in -- to be able to have a little more nuclear forces, it is very sad. You are wasting your mind; you are wasting your brain; you are wasting your science; and certainly we wouldn't need any tuition if we stopped this nonsense. But nobody dares to say that, you see. That's considered great.
You may know that 300 years ago, the -- people had these tremendous trousers, just pumped up. The modern astronauts are as just -- a fashion of big
trousers. And how did the Empress -- Eugenie -- what did she wear? crinoline, you see. Now today our modern -- crinoline is this physics Labor. What has this to do with the destiny of man? Nothing. But you boast of this, and you think you are at the head of civilization. Well, the wonderful thing about your -- our notion of time is that you cannot distinguish what's past and what's future. And perhaps you are in the -- at the tail end of civilization. Certainly you cannot prove that you are advancing.
In your notion of time, the past and the future cannot be distinguished. They become absolutely indistinguishable. They are just extensions in space. In this direction 3,000 years, and in this direction 3,000 years. But why we should extend 3,000 years backward or forward, nobody could tell you.
Now the Ten Commandments, or the story of creation in the Bible are very simple. They are so short, that you can encompass with one glance the beginning and the end. And this to me is the real paradox, or the real secret, or the real eternity of the Bible story. The last century has poked fun at this and said it wasn't scientifically true, that the sun was first, and man was later. Well, it is even scientifically true; every word of it is true, as you well know. And they -- and the biologists have nothing better to tell us. But it wasn't written for biological purposes. It wasn't written to explain to you the life of the plants on this globe. But it was written to enable you to encompass with one glance end and beginning. And that makes you divine. Anybody who can overlook the beginning of a campaign and the end, you see, is the real man, the man who is created in the image of God. And that's meant by the Bible, when it says that man was not created as a higher animal, or as a mammal, or as an ape, but he was created in the image of the creator.
Any one of you can participate in the act of creation, because you can understand that the past and the future are one and the same thing. It doesn't matter at what moment of this march of events you happen to be alive, conscious. You -- you can share in all the agonies of the beginnings, and all the triumphs of the past by treating them as one. You do this every time when you speak of George Washington and President Johnson. There you have the triumph of the beginning and the agony at the end.
This is denied by our official doctrine today, that the future and the past must enter an alliance in your heart. But before this, times don't exist. Time depends for every reasonable notion for this, our power, to think of the future and of the beginning of something and of its end as one and the same thing. In different phases, yes. But this -- that this should be one, nobody can prove to you. You must believe it.
So this whole problem which now irks these people, you see, about the death of God, or the God of death, is very funny really. Because they are all spoiled by physics. And so these poor theologians want to be scientific, and they don't know that the scientists are cripples. The scientist, you see, has to omit his love for his colleagues, or his jealousy for his colleagues which of course completely dominate his life, without the love of the -- Danish physicist--what was his name?--Niels Bohr for Einstein and for {Lad Roosefield}, the bomb wouldn't have been created. There was a very personal tie between these people. And you owe their friendship that we exist today, that we -- could have the bomb and throw it over Yokohama.
So the friendship of the physicist is much more decisive and much more important than that they think. That's just dust. But that they should trust each other and should cooperate--the friendship of the staff of any physics laboratory--this is unique, and this is divine. And this im- -- is imitating -- man in the image of his creator, that people of different nations, of different stature, of different age, even of different sex can so cooperate, you see, that their work cannot be dismantled, cannot be integrated -- disintegrated into fragments.
Why is this never mentioned? Well, they are too modest, I'm -- suppose. But you must know this as laymen, that we do not live by the results of the -- of the physicists, except for their devotion to each other, for their selfless devotion, their dedication not to some abstract thing, but helping each other. And that is, of course, the whole lesson of the Bible story, that man is only fulfilling the purpose of his -- the creator, if he accepts the fact that God created the whole world, the whole earth. Heaven and earth. Imagine! What an incredible insinuation. The Romans -- never believed that -- their god Romulus ever created anything but Rome. Athens? Oh, no, that can be destroyed. Corinth can be destroyed. Carthage was destroyed, and very radically so, because that has nothing to do with a Roman god. A Roman god wouldn't protect Carthage. So we bomb today Vietnam out of existence, because --.
I rea- -- wrote you this letter where this young man had the effrontery to write that -- that 10 -- how was it? hundred -- a hundred people killed every week, you see, for -- would do -- are very worthwhile, because this is the greatest boom America has ever experienced. And what did he do? He omitted all the dead on the Vietnamese side. He only spoke of the hundred Americans killed every week. Very significant, you see. That's exactly what the Romans did in the -- in the war against Carthage. And we are back to this, you see.
This country today is a clearly pagan country. Because it said that somebody who is killed on our side is killed for a great cause, and the man who dying on the other side is not our concern.
You -- you see, the message of the Jews was very pertinent to a very small people, mostly vanquished, always in danger of being vanquished, and trying just the same to find some meaning in their existence. They could only find some meaning if, from the beginning to the end, there was a permanent purpose, going through their victories just as much as their defeats. The destruction of Jerusalem had to -- mean as much as the conquest of Jerusalem, and as the founding of Jerusalem. All this is the consequence if you believe in the Sabbath. If you allow yourself to count the years, you see, every seven years, you are back to the whole. And the -- Christian Church of course has taken over this tradition, and believes, since St. Augustine, that there is a Great Sabbath at the end of the 6,000 years of his world history. I believe the same, by the way. And I think I am less superstitious than you are, because you don't believe anything with regard to time. You just live some time, some moment. A rather poor arrangement.
And what do you say when the -- when the owner of your hotel in which you now live today, in 1967, comes tomorrow, knocks at your door and say, "Sorry; I've rented your room to somebody else"? You have no way -- no excuse. You have to go. It's rented to somebody else. This is how you live on this earth. "Rented to somebody else" is always written on you. My house cannot be rented to somebody else, because it isn't my house, and when -- I never thought it was my house. It is owned by the same man who will occupy it tomorrow. And I am part and partner of his will, and I try to do it. And therefore, tomorrow has no -- is not more frightening than yesterday. But you want to own the place at which you live today, and you can't. It's just impossible. It's a misunderstanding that your time can be treated as though it was your space. You can buy property, although at some risk, as you know. But you can't buy your own time. This man in uniform there has no time of his own. He's just on furlough. Or -- I hope you are. I mean, the uniform is only an attempt to remind us that nobody is on -- in his own time.
There is only one time: God's time. And that you steal time and say, "It's my time," that's an error in judgment.
The great enemy today of the Jewish tradition is the word "leisure." The word "leisure" is the opposite from a holiday. And -- avoid it. If you want to kill the American soul totally, then go on with proclaiming more leisure, more leisure, more leisure all the time. People cannot live at leisure. That's not life, but that's suspended animation. And all of America is bound for suspended animation. It's considered a -- a recommendation that you have leisure. Is it really? It's so boring. Leisure makes cruel. Leisure makes wasteful. Leisure leads to druggism. Lei- -- all vices of mankind come from leisure. But they are all cured by holidays, because on a holiday, we resume the unity of purpose, supposedly. That's the meaning of a holy day, you see, that you become whole. That we
gather around that which we have in common with all men that have ever lived before, and are ever to live again.
And therefore, the Jewish and the Christian calendar are endless. They are not 46 days a year, as I told you the ancients only had. But you can, if you study the Church calendar -- the monks and the nuns can find a very eloquent and very telling holiday every day in the calendar. I've given much time in my youth to the study of the calendar, because of course there was, living in a big city, no calendar of any operative power. You live the same way. The calendar has no power over your lives, really. When I came to this country, I had to lecture on Good Friday. That's the highest holiday for any Protestant in Europe. And I -- was like blasphemy to me, that they -- they had lectures and workday giving on -- on Good Friday. This country, you see, is now artificially re-creating holidays by giving the Monday after Lincoln's Birthday the character of no work. And you will -- have to create by hook and crook holidays. A holiday is a -- is a day which is longer than the astronomical day. No holiday can be celebrated for 24 hours only. It has to have an eve in the beginning, and it has to have an aftermath later. And this country has destroyed the power of celebrating holidays. And instead, they are speaking--even presidents of colleges--they are pre- -- speaking of leisure.
There is a man in this country, in New England, who is my colleague. And this bastard of a man has written a book in which he says that the Puritans had 200 days of leisure. Now these most industrious and -- busy people, the Puritans of course, had no days of leisure. But they had holidays. That's the opposite from leisure. On a leisure -- day of leisure, everybody does as he pleases. You see, he is written great, big. But the discipline of a holiday is of course that nobody can do as he pleases. And that's the beauty of it, you see. Most people, you see, as Wordsworth has said, you see, are nauseated by their own freedom. You just vomit if you -- people tell you, you should do as you please. How does anybody know what he wants? Nobody does. And if you -- tell this a person too long, he goes nuts. He goes crazy. Tell anybody that he can do as he pleases, and there's nothing that pleases him.
But you are brought up on all these terrible heresies, you see, of an -- a Phoenician and a Greek mind, because the anti-Semitism of course permeates all your thinking, so you have to throw out the Jewish tradition, one way or the other. And one way is to deny that the future is known before the past, and that you direct your steps from the past into the future, because of your anticipating the future. You are here as students to prepare yourself for a life after college. So you are here, in anticipation of your future. And that's the only reason why we can be excused for wasting your time. Because it not a waste of time that you prepare yourself for the future, you see. It would be a waste of time if you came
here and said, "I know nothing; I have -- I'm just here," you see, then you would begin to yawn, and you would deteriorate, and you would degenerate, and you would waste your time, as many, of course, do. And the degeneration in a -- in a college generation comes of course from this idea that today governs tomorrow. Now -- but look around: tomorrow governs today. It is so simple that I am -- always blush when I say such platitudes. But then I look into the textbooks and the newspapers and I have to say, "It doesn't seem to be a platitude. I have to tell you this," because it is regularly, every day forgotten. People tell you that yesterday and today create -- tomorrow.
Now you can't become a doctor if this were true. The fact that you want to be a doctor tomorrow determines to which school you go, determines to which college you go; it determines everything. It may even determine whom you marry, because she has to pull you through. And then you say the future is the result of the past and the present. Have you ever heard such nonsense? But this is what you all -- officially have to believe.
So the paganism at this moment is rampant, and we are back to the days before Christ; and the Jews suffer. Whenever paganism--Egypt, Phoenicia, Rome--comes to the fore, the Jews are persecuted and executed, because they are the memorable witness to the fact that God created the past on behalf of the future. On behalf of the future. There is no past except with this goal and this purpose in which we have to support Him. The future is older than the past. If you cannot understand this, Sir, then you cannot graduate from a college. And I'm afraid nine-tenths of the people who seem to have graduated from our colleges have not graduated. Because this they brutally deny. They say that they know everything about the past, and nothing of the future. This is impossible, because the future is explanatory of the past. In your own life, too. Looking backward, you can explain why you had to marry this girl, you see, and why you had to -- to voice your interest for this vocation. But not by trying to -- to weigh your vitamins and your ounces of fat, and then determine what you should become. The future cannot be deduced by scientific measurement. Don't try it. They do, now.
The only forecast I have to admit happened in my own life. Perhaps I may entertain you with this little story. When my son graduated, I -- he was asked to prove himself, to be tested for his professional -- abilities, and what would he best choose as a profession. You know, they do this. And of course the only answer is that you have to do the one thing for which you are not fit. And -- well, I was curious to see what happened. And so I took the test, too.
And -- answer came that I could be a doctor, and I could be a teacher, and I could be a newspaper man. Very high, elaborate percentages. But for a vacuum
cleaner salesman, they gave me minus 2. So we were very curious. And I wrote back to Boston, where the center of this institution was, and said, "What do you mean by minus 2?"
Answer came, and I must say it's a very witty answer. They said, "If you go out in the morning with one vacuum cleaner, you come back with two in the evening."
Now I think the man who wrote this deserves to be president of the United States.
So I have to correct myself. We can give negative predictions. This man was absolutely right that he said if I go out in the morning, you see, I -- I'm stuck. So he can warn me and say, "Don't do that." So I have to limit my -- my curse on the predictors by saying that certain hurdles, you see, are unsurmountable, and therefore I should know this. I think you -- you cannot --. Ugliness, handicaps, I mean, physical handicaps and so have to be taken into account. They exclude certain possibilities, of course. In my case, I mean, I'm not a salesman.
So I think I have to -- correct myself. Our knowledge with regard to negative qualities is able to predict something in the future. Because it can say, "I -- he will not succeed," and give reasons for why he will not succeed. But if you think of Demosthenes who stammered, and stuttered, and then collected pebbles in his mouth to over- -- you see, to speak so loudly despite the pebbles in his mouth that even the sea could not silence him, it shows that this is a very limited relation to the future. You can predict that if you do not overcome the stammer--Demosthenes, if I do not overcome my, you see--I don't know how you call this silly attitude of not being able to cheat other people--if you don't overcome this, it's a hopeless case.
Negatively, then, the future is not boundless open for every human being. The future is larger for the innocent and for the man with a distinguished talent, who can only play the piano, but not the violin. It would be wise to tell him, "Become a pianist, and not a fiddler," and give the reasons for this. The prediction then, I must -- I think makes this clear, the prediction can limit possibilities. It can say by exclusion, "This he cannot do." You cannot change the United States of America into the island of Cuba. And therefore, a man in America cannot govern, you see, if he has all -- only the features of an island fisherman. All these things are quite true. Limitations in prediction means that the creation of this part of the universe in the future is already predicated in the past.
So I was already too much of a ready-made creature when he said, "He can't sell vacuum cleaners." I'm sorry, but there -- I was, a damned specialist, you
see, in a negative sense. I no longer had the liberty of specializing on -- on salesmanship.
In as far--now this is quite serious, because it is even theological, gentlemen--in as far as you and I are already finished creatures, have already certain distinguished qualities, outspoken, and ineradicable ones, we have already left the cradle and the womb of time and this wonderful process of being created. We have been created. And so the judgment is already there: he is nothing but. He has already forfeited his liberty to become something else. In general, you will admit that where there is life, there is the power to change. And where there is future, there is the unknown quality that you may van- -- conquer, you may vanquish, you may overcome all your stuttering and stammering, and all your handicaps. But it is perfectly legitimate to say that the man can know of the future that which by the nature of this candidate for the future is excluded. A man who is deaf and dumb probably cannot become a great orator. That's a safe guess.
But you understand this is -- always means that a part of the creative process can be already definitely shelved and say, "It has happened; this is all over." There is no longer this wonderful process by which everything the next morning can be changed. You belong to an -- to an age group in which the amount of changeability far outweigh the amount of unchangeability. If you really love your country, and love your sweetheart, and love yourself, and love the Spirit, there is no limit to how far you can go. Or next to no limit. And I would say the -- the limitations, as in my case, you see, are minor. Today they are considered too high. I think the predictors are ruining your courage very often, because they take these personal features of talent and endowment too seriously. I assure you, talents are a very small part of our life's achievement. I have known many people in many fields who have achieved the greatest things because of their handicap, because they knew from the beginning that this handicap would handicap them. So they said, "What of it? Well, I want to be a discoverer, just the same."
And I know of a man, the German Emperor William II, who fell seasick every time he entered a ship. Yet the poor man built the German navy, and undauntedly went seasick every time he go- -- went on one of his beloved ships. That's quite something. It's a great tester -- test of his character, and perhaps the best thing he has ever done with his character. He -- he overcame this natural handicap and said, "That's no reason why I shouldn't be the admiral of my fleet."
Every one of you has the same weaknesses, like this German emperor. And every one can laugh them out of court and say, "That's all rid- -- doesn't matter." With your lower part, you can succumb to seasickness. And with your
upper part, you can still be Nelson at Trafalgar.
Well, I mean it. Everybody has to. How is any achievement possible? You will find that -- that the greatest men of mankind had terrible handicaps, I mean. Obviously Moses stammered. He needed Aaron to overcome this -- you see, had to have this official priest officiating for him, because he was not eloquent. He had a heavy mouth. But the -- what did it matter? Moses still outshone Aaron by -- by the full length of the sunlight.
So handicaps of this natural order do not alter this -- reality that the future governs the past. And if I -- you could try to see this, gentlemen, you would understand why the mission of Israel is an eternal mission, why we cannot live without it, why we would be enslaved as soon as we would believe these physicists. They are wrong. They are just wrong, because they don't -- and -- I mean, the excuse is that they are devoted friends and great comrades in arms with each other. And the real achievement of the scientific four centuries is the selfless identification of many hundreds of people in research--that is, the creation of a -- of a little community, you see, of the highest rank--it's something of celestial -- the celestial order of harmony, and self-surrender, and selflessness. And for this reason, I take my hat off to the natural scientific community. But not for the stupid ideas they have.
Because if you tell them this, you see, that they live on this mutual reliance, they get very nervous. They don't want to hear any of these -- this stuff. I've tried it. It doesn't work. So a certain amount of blindness, or deafness, or obtuseness is obviously a part of any specialist, you see. He doesn't quite want to know what he is up against, or what he is out for.
The Jewish tradition in the prophecy -- prophets, you see, is an attempt to keep this fact, that the future already is created and explains the past, before the people. For a minor -- minority group like the Jews, it was a way of explaining the defeats, the encumbrance, the handicaps of this tiny group. And perhaps it is necessary for your understanding the Bible--as it was written around the Sabbath, and around the creation of the world in six days, you see, and one day of rest--it is necessary that I give you some more examples of how it was written down, the story of the six days, and the day of rest in the end.
If the whole world is a process of six days of creation and the World Sabbath waiting for us to come--as the fathers of the Church believe, the pope believes, I believe, and the Jews believe--then the -- the content of each day cannot be found in what this day says of itself. If the Assyrians dominate, it is not enough to say, "The Assyrians dominate." But you have to find some term in which you say, "This is the time in which these big kingdoms dominate," you see.
And thereby Assyria is made into one of many, and is already dismissed as hav- -- for seeing its downfall.
The whole Bible is written in this manner. And it's a simple principle that this, what is created today, has a purpose which outruns and outstrips he who seems to be the carrier of this message.
My -- we sh- -- have a proverb in German, we -- "Man soll in Tag vor dem Abend loben." I don't know how you say in English, "You shall not praise the day -- today, you see, before the -- it's evening." The power of seeing the inevitable downfall of any power of today is of course the special biblical sermon, the special biblical -- biblical teaching. Take the greatest king, the greatest tyrant, the greatest dictator: in his face there is already written in his face there is already written the rune of mortality and fallibility. So Mr. Hitler may on April 20th still condemn thousands of people to die, but eight days later, he has committed suicide. And it's a great spectacle before our eyes, that the -- the Nazis have managed for a whole year to know that they are finished, and to execute still millions of people, and not altering the fact at all the -- in the end result. It obviously is a lesson for your scientific mentalities which cannot understand that we already anticipate the future when we are a human being.
And these -- Hitler has acted like a good physicist, and he has treated -- the whole world as a -- just as a scene for physical action. Gruesome as it is. And the more you -- you approach the -- acts of these people, the more you stou- -- are astounded that on April 25th, they still -- Hitler could still execute his brother-inlaw, and on April 26th, he could shoot himself. Now why his brother-in-law Fegelein, had to be executed is really very hard for you and me to understand, but for the logic of a physicist, that's perfectly logical, you see. First comes first, and second comes second. For a human being, you see, second comes first.
The behavior of the -- the -- the -- the end of the Nazis, you see, is not a German story. And it is not a Russian story, and it's not an American story. It's a very human story. God sends, of course, these examples of Nebuchadnezzar, and of Moses, and of Pharaoh, under the name of a separate country. But if you miss the -- the point, and if you think the Germans did this, you are quite mistaken. Man does this. Man in the form of such a group. But as long as you isolate the attitudes of -- of Hitler from the attitudes of the Americans, you can neither understand Vietnam nor Hitler. All these acts are already today penen- -- perpetrated in complete solidarity. That is, they have a meaning for this man. Obviously the world wars are one great revolution. I've written such a book on this; and it must be true. Therefore, it's one event, from 1914 to 1945. To cut it into two events is ridiculous. And since it is one event, the various actors in this one event, you see, can only have partial roles. I mean, if you -- if you can ta- -- call
Mr. Hitler Malvolio in the play. But that isn't -- Malvolio is after all in a whole play. And the princes' court is just as much involved as Viola's household.
And in the same sense, gentlemen, world history has been enacted before your eyes to no good purpose, because you try very vividly to isolate: the Russians have done this, and the Chinese are doing this, and the Americans are doing this, and Mr. Ho Chi Minh are doing this. Do you really believe -- in this nonsense, you people, in a puppet theater? Do you really believe that these puppets are not God's puppets? That you have any right to isolate one and the other and say, "They are good" and "They are bad"? It's just ridiculous. And I mean, you can only vomit when you read the papers. Because they have not the faintest idea how life is lived. But you know very well that it is lived from the end towards the beginning. And therefore the outcome, that this wants to become one world is of course domineering over every one issue.
And we at this moment are the idiots who deny the simple fact that the United States -- Woodrow Wilson was the great man who saw in 1889 that the world had to have an organization of the whole, and that everything else is minor, a substitute for this great action of our creator who has created so many tribes, so many empires, so many centuries, and now says the time has come to pull together and to make this one great order. He -- wrote this book in 1889. He was pres- -- made president in 1912. He lost his health over this in 1919. In 1923 when he was dying, he convenes the students of this country at his home, and said to them: "It has all been in vain. You haven't -- nobody has listened to my warning. Therefore there has to come a much greater catastrophe, the Second World War, in which the losses will be much greater than this time."
Now which textbook mentions this to you? What are these falsifiers of history, who call themselves professors of history? That they do not tell you that Wilson was a prophet, and anticipated the complete downfall of this realm's -- this country's so-called foreign policy. You see. What you have is a department of state, carefully hiding.
Well, really and truly. It's the laughingstock of the world, the American state department. And rightly so, because they continue the isolationist situation of 1880, in which you didn't have to -- care for the rest of the world. The Americans were perfectly safe. But now that isn't true.
So you can miss the bus very much, even today, gentlemen, just by reading the papers. All the headlines are false. They are all obsolete. There is no America, there is no Asia, There is no Africa in the -- in the -- meaningfully, you see. There just isn't. There are parts and particles. You can say that -- that San Jose and San Rafaelo are towns in California. But you know how little true that
is. And is Santa Cruz an independent unit? Belongs, as I -- I have been told, to the -- University of California.
So the whole is today winning out over the part to such an extent as the Bible couldn't have wished better. That's for the purpose for which the Jews have suffered. The smallest group in the Mediterranean, always conquered, always threatened by the big Goliath: little David, you see, and only by hook and crook, finishing off the giant. But always knowing that that what is today receives its interpretation from tomorrow. And since we know the purpose of man, -- a universal order, or a universal peace, the today can be adjusted, can be properly handled. Not from the past, but from the future.
The eye is given us to remember who created it. If you keep this sentence, this very simple sentence, you have something of similar poignancy as the great hour of Sappho at midnight, when she said, "I am alone." The Greek spirit has the genius to hold out against the whole world all by itself, by its -- and it's worth writing poetry, it's worth considering this stroke of genius which fills the -- the empty hour, this hour of suffering, and creates an immortal poem. The Greeks are right, but the Jews are right, too, who say of the same moment, "That will pass. That's not the final meaning, the emptiness of this hour. But we have to suffer in order to learn what the purpose of this suffering is. There is beyond this moment something that will explain it. And therefore I cannot sacrifice today to the wrong god of the moment, to Baal," as the Bible says so often, you see. And the great -- the great hope of the Old Testament is of course that there always will be people in Israel who do not bow their knees to Baal. And more, you and I cannot hope for, either.