The first baby of the century is still in a dark, warm womb somewhere, unaware of the fuss it is generating. It has already been promised the world — free diapers, toys, scholarships. Why all this for an infant who will care for nothing other than its mother’s milk? Because this baby represents a new age — the twenty-first century.

Time has always been a big issue in our society; we constantly watch the clock. As soon as they can tell the big hand from the little hand, kids eagerly await for recess. We adults always have an appointment somewhere with someone at some time. Now the clock is ticking for our big appointment with the new century. It is a “tabula rasa,” or clean slate. Tabula rasa was a notion developed by the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke. He believed that the mind is born blank, a tabula rasa upon which the world inscribes itself through the experience of the five senses. With the arrival of the year 2000, we seem to have a clean slate, upon which all the firsts can commence — the first flight of the century, the first party of the century, the first . . .

There is a curious sense of reverence for the year 2000. As a prelude, there is the rush to become Y2K compliant, lest our carefully engineered electronic world collapse before our eyes. Yet as Jews, there is a greater fear than losing the information stored in our computers. It is the fear that many of our co-religionists are losing the collective experience of the Jewish people. In the year of Y2K, we remain a bit too “compliant” with secular society.

Although the degree of integration into secular society varies among our communities, we are generally very immersed in American culture. It is a tempting milieu: we have the trappings of freedom, the choice of being whatever, whoever we want to be. But here lies the danger: If we don’t have anti-Semitism to remind us who we are, and we don’t remind ourselves, what kind of Jewish future can we expect? Physically we have never been freer. Spiritually, however, freedom has enslaved us to the pleasures of life.

How much has changed in a century? Just 100 years ago, Ashkenazi Jews living in Europe’s Pale of Settlement were beginning their exodus to America. At the turn of the century, Reform rabbis such as Isaac Mayer Wise insisted that the Jew should assimilate into the host culture, that he should forget the old ways and learn the new. Looking back, we see the tragic legacy of this approach, with millions of Jews lost to intermarriage and indifference.

And what about anti-Semitism? The two world wars will shortly be relegated to a previous century. Soon all the Holocaust survivors will be gone. Is it possible to discard the past, to achieve a tabula rasa? Can we truly say that the Holocaust is a thing of the past? Or had we better take notice of the recent electoral success of an anti-Semitic party in Austria, where Hitler was born and where he began his offensive against the world?

King Solomon said, “There is nothing new under the sun.” We must not get too comfortable in the new era. We remain in exile, and history has a habit of repeating itself.

And so where will the Jew stand in the next century, in a world that is increasingly secular? Tabula rasa is an illusion, like a glossy reflection in a pond. We see ourselves reflected on the surface and all looks well, but we cannot know what lurks beneath the surface. Today we live in a tolerant land, but who knows what tomorrow will bring?

Ultimately for us, the year 2000 is not a time marker; it’s just another year of galus, of exile. We should not feel so at home after all we have endured as a nation.

Time is a finite concept, one made for man. G-d and His Torah transcend the finite. In the final analysis, when all the trappings are stripped away, the only salient matter is that we are chosen by G-d to keep His Torah. Our relationship with G-d, our Torah learning — only here lies the truth of infinity, where time plays no role. We dare not jettison our collective Jewish experience, for in it — in Torah, in our glorious history of cleaving to G-d — lies our salvation.

May the year 2000 see the beginning of the era of Mashiach. May we merit to see the menorah being kindled in the Bais HaMikdash in our days.

Sara Levy