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The Jewish Calendar: Sanctifying Time in a Fractured World
Mourners visit the graves of fallen IDF soldiers at Israel’s Yom HaZikaron ceremony. Photo: Israel Defense Forces
Time doesn’t always move the way we expect it to. Sometimes it blurs — with days stretching endlessly, their differences erased. Sometimes, everything happens at once, compressing joy and grief, memory and urgency, into a single, overwhelming present.
Since October 7, I’ve felt both: the loss of rhythm and the intensity of everything arriving at the same moment. I find myself forgetting what came before, uncertain how to prepare for what’s next. The rituals and holidays that once structured the year now land with surprising weight, or else pass almost unnoticed, leaving me searching for a sense of passage.
On November 24, 2023 — just before the release of the first hostages — Rabbi Oded Mazor penned a prayer:
In the days when each hour collides with the next
We have no choice but to cry and to laugh with the same eyes
To mourn and to dance at the same time
And the long arc of history is compressed into one day and one hour…
There is no order in this kind of time. Tears and laughter, mourning and music, are all pressed together. The calendar’s boxes are still there, but what fills them is unpredictable, and often too much to hold.
In the season of the Yamim — Yom HaShoah, Yom HaZikaron, and Yom HaAtzmaut — I’m especially aware of this disorientation. The rituals that are supposed to mark transitions often feel like thin threads pulled through chaos. When time is broken, how do we begin to heal?
Time as an Act of Freedom
While still slaves in Egypt, with no power over their own days or nights, the very first mitzvah ever given to the Jewish people was declaring the new month. God did not hand us a calendar to follow; God gave us the power and responsibility to shape it. Slaves do not own their time. The commandment to sanctify the new month was an act of spiritual agency — a way to say, “We may not control our circumstances, but we can shape our experience of them.” We built the rhythms and boundaries that give life meaning.
That same creative impulse lives in how we’ve shaped the modern calendar, and especially in the sequence of placing Yom HaZikaron directly before Yom HaAtzmaut. This structure was designed not to ease the emotional weight, but to heighten it. To insist that independence could not be celebrated without acknowledging its cost—and that mourning must give way to meaning.
The calendar was built to hold that intensity, and to transform it into something sacred. The emotional whiplash is real, but it is also honest. It says that celebration built on forgetfulness is empty, and that mourning cut off from hope is paralyzing. The calendar itself becomes a ritual, a choreography of the Jewish soul.
Time, Separation, and Sanctity
When time collapses or blurs, I find myself longing for boundaries. Not barriers, but passages that guide us. Judaism offers rituals of separation — like Havdalah at the end of Shabbat — as tools for transition. These rituals bless the space between sacred and ordinary.
This need for sanctity and distinction feels urgent in a time when so much has collapsed. Over the past year, we have seen people invent small rituals to push back against the blur. One I return to often is the Wings of Hope project.
In the summer of 2023, educator and mother Livnat Kutz invited children from her kibbutz, Kfar Aza, to help decorate a local bomb shelter. They gathered broken plastic toys, and — with creativity and vision — formed them into a pair of massive, colorful wings on the shelter wall.
It was a joyful, imaginative expression of freedom and hope. Then came October 7. Livnat, her husband Aviv, and their three children, Rotem, Yonatan, and Yiftach, were brutally murdered in their home. The family was gone — but the wings they built remained. Untouched. Unharmed.
Wings of Hope have been recreated around the world — as rituals of memory, healing, and longing for peace. At a recent M² seminar, educators wrote prayers on paper wings; in schools worldwide, children created “wings of blessing,” honoring lives and hostages. More than a memorial, Wings of Hope shows how Jewish time is marked through lived experience, and how our communities have embraced it as a powerful new ritual — one that expands tradition, sanctifies time, and gives deep emotions a form we can carry together.
Shaping Our Own Meaning Today
Jewish time is not only a record of what has happened. It is an imperative — an opportunity to participate, to shape the emotional and spiritual rhythms of the community. When the calendar feels out of sync, our challenge is not to surrender to the blur, but to to make each passage, however fragile, a place of meaning.
This year, as the Yamim return, let’s build them — out of memory, out of ritual, out of the full weight of what has been lost and what must still be hoped for. Because the calendar is not something that simply happens to us. It is something we are called, again and again, to create.
Shuki Taylor is the Founder & CEO of M2:The Institute for Experiential Jewish Education.
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Syrian Leader al-Sharaa Holds Talks With Erdogan on Surprise Istanbul Visit
Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syria’s interim president, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s president, met during al-Sharaa’s first diplomatic trip since the fall of the al-Assad regime. Photo: Screenshot
i24 News – Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was holding talks with Syrian counterpart Ahmed al-Sharaa in Istanbul on Saturday, local media reported. No further details were available.
This comes one day after the US administration of President Donald Trump issued orders that it said would effectively lift sanctions on Syria in order to help the country rebuild after a devastating civil war.
The Treasury Department issued a general license that authorizes transactions involving the interim Syrian government led by Al-Sharaa, as well as the central bank and state-owned enterprises.
The general license, known as GL25, “authorizes transactions prohibited by the Syrian Sanctions Regulations, effectively lifting sanctions on Syria,” the Treasury said in a statement.
Syria welcomed the sanctions waiver early on Saturday, which the Foreign Ministry called a “positive step in the right direction to alleviate the country’s humanitarian and economic suffering.”
Syria is keen on cooperating with other countries “on the basis of mutual respect and non-interference in internal affairs. It believes that dialogue and diplomacy are the best path to building balanced relations,” the ministry said in a statement.
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‘It Was Just An Accident’ by Iran’s Jafar Panahi Wins Cannes’ Top Prize
Director Jafar Panahi, Palme d’Or award winner for the film “Un simple accident” (It Was Just an Accident), reacts, during the closing ceremony of the 78th Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France, May 24, 2025. REUTERS/Benoit Tessier
Revenge thriller “It Was Just An Accident” by Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who was last at the Cannes Film Festival in person more than 20 years ago, won the Palme d’Or top prize on Saturday.
Panahi, who has been arrested several times for his filmmaking and was under a travel ban until recently, last attended the festival in person in 2003, when “Crimson Gold” was screened in the Un Certain Regard category.
“Art mobilizes the creative energy of the most precious, most alive part of us. A force that transforms darkness into forgiveness, hope and new life,” said jury president Juliette Binoche when announcing the award.
“It Was Just An Accident” follows Vahid, played by Vahid Mobasseri, who kidnaps a man with a false leg who looks just like the one who tortured him in prison and ruined his life.
Vahid sets out to verify with other prison survivors that it is indeed their torturer – and then decide what to do with him.
An emotional Panahi, wearing sunglasses on stage, thanked his cast and film crew during his acceptance speech.
The Grand Prix, the second-highest prize after the Palme d’Or, was awarded to “Sentimental Value” from acclaimed director Joachim Trier.
The jury prize was split between the intergenerational family drama “Sound of Falling” from German director Mascha Schilinski and “Sirat,” about a father and son who head into the Moroccan desert, by French-Spanish director Oliver Laxe.
Brazil’s “The Secret Agent” won two awards, one for best actor for Wagner Moura, as well as best director for Kleber Mendonca Filho.
“I was having Champagne,” said Mendonca Filho after he ran up to the stage to collect his award after celebrating Moura, who previously made a name for himself in hit TV series “Narcos.”
Newcomer Nadia Melliti took home best actress for “The Little Sister,” a queer coming-of-age story centered around the daughter of Algerian immigrants in Paris.
Belgium’s Dardenne brothers, who have the rare honor of already having won two Palme d’Or prizes, took home the award for best screenplay for their film “Young Mothers.”
Twenty-two films in total were competing for the prize at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, with entries from well-known directors Richard Linklater, Wes Anderson and Ari Aster.
Saturday’s closing ceremony officially ends the glamour-filled festival that began on May 13.
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Judge Temporarily Blocks Trump Admin From Revoking Harvard Enrollment of Foreign Students
US President Trump speaks to the media at the annual White House Easter Egg Roll, Washington, DC, April 21, 2025. Photo: Andrew Leyden/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
A US judge on Friday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from revoking Harvard University’s ability to enroll foreign students, a policy the Ivy League school called part of President Donald Trump’s broader effort to retaliate against it for refusing to “surrender its academic independence.”
The order provides temporary relief to thousands of international students who were faced with being forced to transfer under a policy that the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based university called a “blatant violation” of the US Constitution and other federal laws, and said would have an “immediate and devastating effect” on the university and more than 7,000 visa holders.
“Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard,” the 389-year-old school said in its lawsuit filed earlier on Friday in Boston federal court. Harvard enrolled nearly 6,800 international students in its current school year, equal to 27% of total enrollment.
The move was the latest escalation in a broader battle between Harvard and the White House, as Trump seeks to compel universities, law firms, news media, courts and other institutions that value independence from partisan politics to align with his agenda. Trump and fellow Republicans have long accused elite universities of left-wing bias.
Harvard has pushed back hard against Trump, having previously sued to restore nearly $3 billion in federal grants that had been frozen or canceled. In recent weeks, the administration has proposed ending Harvard’s tax-exempt status and hiking taxes on its endowment, and opened an investigation into whether it violated civil rights laws.
Leo Gerden, a Swedish student set to graduate Harvard with an undergraduate degree in economics and government this month, called the judge’s ruling a “great first step” but said international students were bracing for a long legal fight that would keep them in limbo.
“There is no single decision by Trump or by Harvard or by a judge that is going to put an end to this tyranny of what Trump is doing,” Gerden said.
In its complaint, Harvard said the revocation would force it to retract admissions for thousands of people, and has thrown “countless” academic programs, clinics, courses and research laboratories into disarray, just a few days before graduation. It said the revocation was a punishment for Harvard’s “perceived viewpoint,” which it called a violation of the right to free speech as guaranteed by the US Constitution’s First Amendment.
The Trump administration may appeal US District Judge Allison Burroughs’ ruling. In a statement, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said, “unelected judges have no right to stop the Trump Administration from exercising their rightful control over immigration policy and national security policy.”
Since Trump’s inauguration on January 20, his administration has accused several universities of indifference toward the welfare of Jewish students during widespread campus protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
Harvard’s court challenges over the administration’s policies stand in contrast to its New York-based peer Columbia University’s concessions to similar pressure. Columbia agreed to reform disciplinary processes and review curricula for courses on the Middle East, after Trump pulled $400 million in funding over allegations the Ivy League school had not done enough to combat antisemitism.
In announcing on Thursday the termination of Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification, effective starting in the 2025-2026 academic year, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, without providing evidence, accused the university of “fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party.”
Harvard says a fifth of its foreign students in 2024 were from China. US lawmakers from both parties have expressed concerns about the influence of the Chinese government on US college campuses, including efforts by Beijing-directed Chinese student associations to monitor political activities and stifle academic speech.
The university says it is committed to combating antisemitism and investigating credible allegations of civil rights violations.
HARVARD DEFENDS ‘REFUSAL TO SURRENDER’
In her brief order blocking the policy for two weeks, Burroughs said Harvard had shown it could be harmed before there was an opportunity to hear the case in full. The judge, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, scheduled hearings for May 27 and May 29 to consider next steps in the case. Burroughs is also overseeing Harvard’s lawsuit over the grant funds.
Harvard University President Alan Garber said the administration was illegally seeking to assert control over the private university’s curriculum, faculty and student body.
“The revocation continues a series of government actions to retaliate against Harvard for our refusal to surrender our academic independence,” Garber wrote in a letter on Friday to the Harvard community.
The revocation could also weigh on Harvard’s finances. At many US universities, international students are more likely to pay full tuition, essentially subsidizing aid for other students.
“It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition payments,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.
Harvard’s bonds, part of its $8.2 billion debt pile, have been falling since Trump first warned US universities in March of cuts to federal funding.
International students enrolled at Harvard include Cleo Carney, daughter of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, and Princess Elisabeth, first in line to the Belgian throne.
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