Redeeming The Time — Part I

    We live in a culture that is very good at avoiding ultimate questions. Death is kept offstage. Time is treated as infinite. The modern self is trained to strive, consume, showcase, curate, and distract, but not often to reckon. The deepest matters are postponed, not necessarily out of malice, but out of habit. There is always another headline, another obligation, another performance of busyness.

    That is why the most recent conversation that Ben Sasse had with interviewer and journalist Peter Robinson at the Hoover Institution (a conservative think-tank associated with Stanford University) lands with unusual force, at least for me. On its surface, it is an interview with a former United States Senator, as well as a former university president. In reality, it is something rarer in modern elite discourse; an unsparing confrontation with mortality.

    Sasse, who is 54-years-old, has been diagnosed with stage-four pancreatic cancer. The question hovering over the exchange was not legislative strategy or partisan maneuvering, but what remains when the usual distractions and ambitions are stripped of their power. He speaks candidly about regret, forgiveness, prayer, and what he calls “redeeming the time”; learning, as life narrows, to hold ambition lightly and to love more deliberately.

    It is a moving and heart-wrenching reflection/interview. But it is also, in a deeper sense, an ancient one. The phrase “redeeming the time” comes from the Book of Ephesians 5:16. “Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” However, if you, dear reader, will allow me, I would like to briefly channel my preacher forefathers (hoping to do them proud) and, well…give a littler sermon, returning to the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), and try and briefly tackle one of, if not the most important question any text, ancient or modern, has ever asked: Where shall wisdom be found?

    As I was brought up and marinated in Protestant theology (while having divorced myself long ago), lately I have immersed myself in Jewish thought, especially concerning death and wisdom, which is pretty much the same thing. I know that sounds morbid, but to be honest, as more and more of my friends make that final change, and family members get older and find themselves on the doorstep of that change, it just seemed natural. Fortunately, I have gotten to know a local Rabbi to help me through my questions and thought processes with Jewish theology concerning death and wisdom. And while he understands that I am as much a non-believer in his Yahweh as I am with my family’s God, he seems to appreciate my love of Torah wisdom. Think of him as my Jewish Rev. Mel! Who knew! Anyway, if you are not asleep yet, I hope you will keep reading, and find the following paragraphs as interesting and fulfilling as I do.

    Judaism has long insisted that the awareness of death is not a morbid fixation but a form of moral clarity. Kohelet — the book of Ecclesiastes — offers the sober verdict that modern life works so hard to avoid: “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” Not because nothing matters, but because so much of what we chase is mist; acclaim, accumulation, the restless display of importance. The rabbis sharpen the point even further. “Repent one day before your death,” the Talmud teaches. The student, understandably, asks: But how can a person know the day of death? And the answer is the point: Precisely because no one knows, one must repent today.

    In other words, the moral task is not postponed until the final crisis. The human condition is already one of finitude. The question is whether we live as if we remember it. This is what the Jewish tradition calls cheshbon hanefesh — an accounting of the soul. Not an exercise in self-obsession, but in proportion. What matters? What endures? What have we mistaken for ultimate that is, in truth, only temporary? Those are questions that a gnostic sect of one, like me, can wholly endorse.

    Judaism’s most piercing liturgical moment, recited each year on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, makes the matter unavoidable: “Who shall live and who shall die … Who by water and who by fire…” Unetaneh Tokef does not offer comfort through denial. It offers clarity through truth: life is fragile, time is borrowed, and our pretensions are thin.

    What mortality does, what Ben Sasse’s diagnosis forces into view, is the stripping away of the false absolutisms that so often govern modern life. Reputation becomes less urgent. The metrics of elite success begin to look strangely weightless. And what remains, if we are fortunate, are relationships, family, forgiveness, obligation, love, and the hope that one’s days have been oriented toward something beyond the self. Sasse, in his own Christian idiom, is showcasing ideas that Judaism has long institutionalized; the urgency of finitude, the moral demand of time, the necessity of living now as if the horizon is real.

    Throughout the interview, Sasse’s reflections are poignant precisely because modern America is, in so many respects, a culture of evasion. We have constructed entire systems — technological, professional, political — designed to keep first things at bay. Attention is scattered. Status becomes performative. The self becomes a brand. Thanks, Instagram! Seriousness is treated as optional. And nowhere is this evasion more concentrated than among the people who govern our institutions. Our ruling class speaks endlessly in the language of urgency — power, justice, crisis — while quietly building lives organized around careerism, self-protection, and distraction. We have created a secular priesthood of ambition that cannot speak honestly about death, judgment, or the limits of human control.

    The rabbis would recognize the spiritual danger immediately. They were never sentimental about public striving. Honor, they warned, is intoxicating. Recognition is fleeting. The pursuit of status can become a kind of idolatry; not because achievement is evil, but because the modern temptation is to treat achievement as ultimate.

    One of my favorite lines of wisdom comes from the Hebrew text, Pirkei Avon (Ethics of Our Fathers), “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” How powerful is that quote! And while that line captures Judaism’s balance; responsibility without grandiosity, obligation without self-worship; the wisdom of that line is not only for Jews...but for Christians, and Muslims, and even Gnostics, like me, your intrepid reporter. Why? Because the work matters, but the work is not God, Allah, Jesus Christ, Buddha, The Tao, or whatever is at the top of your philosophical/theological house of worship. That balance is precisely what our age lacks. We live amid unprecedented technological abundance, yet also amid unprecedented distraction. The self is curated. Attention is monetized. Institutions are hollowed out not only by ideology, but by exhaustion and drift.

    Nowhere is this more visible than in higher education itself. Our most credentialed institutions often train young people to speak endlessly about justice and power, while offering them remarkably little formation in humility, duty, or the permanent things. They produce graduates fluent in moral performance, yet increasingly incapable of moral seriousness.

    Even politics, which once demanded sacrifice, is increasingly consumed as spectacle: Another theater of resentment, branding, and noise. And yet a republic cannot survive on noise. Democracies depend on citizens capable of restraint, gratitude, seriousness, and moral perspective. They require people who can locate politics within a larger horizon of obligation — family, faith, community, the inheritance of civilization itself. A nation that cannot distinguish the urgent from the ultimate will not remain healthy or free for long.

    Ben Sasse’s conversation is powerful not because it offers a novel insight, but because it forces an old truth back into view: time is not infinite, ambition is not redemption, and the ultimate questions cannot be deferred forever. 

    The Jewish High Holy Day liturgy does not ask whether we will die. It assumes it. It asks instead what we will do with the time we are given: “Who shall live and who shall die…” Death is the one fact no algorithm can curate and no institution can evade. It strips away our distractions and reveals what is real. The question is not whether life is short. The question is whether we will go on pretending otherwise — until we no longer have the luxury.

    “Teach us to number our days,” Jews regularly pray, “that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

    And wisdom begins when we stop confusing busyness for meaning, ambition for redemption, and noise for life. And that wisdom is open to all. Ben Sasse, whether he knows it or not, is deeply in tune with the ancient Hebrew/Jewish writers. He knows he is going to die. And he wants to make his final days count. Here endeth the lesson. Shalom and l’chaim. 

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com