What is one of the first things that prisoners do when they are incarcerated? Famously, they try to keep track of time, marking days and weeks and months on the wall. Somehow, in some way, people recognize that when we lose track of time, we also lose track of ourselves, perhaps in some fundamental way.
Slavery is similar.
Frederick Douglass wrote in his 1845 Narrative:
I have no accurate knowledge of my age … By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs […] I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday.
Psychological research on captivity (e.g., in extreme confinement or modern trafficking) shows that losing track of time leads to disorientation, helplessness, and erosion of self-concept — the mind struggles to maintain a stable “I” without external anchors.
Does this explain why the first commandment specific to the Jewish people was: “This shall be the First Month?” That the very first step in coming out of a slave mentality is to start to appreciate not just where we are, but when we are?
After all, is not a person who is unaware of time essentially stuck, without progression or personal trajectory?
Doesn’t this reflect the rest of the buildup to the Exodus, the verses telling us how to tell the story in each generation, how to understand what happens to us?
Thou mayst tell in the ears of thy son, and of thy son’s son, what things I have done in Egypt, and my signs which I have done among them; that you may know that I am the Lord. (E. 10:2)
Every story requires a timeline, does it not?
Isn’t this really a major part of coming out of Egypt, culminating in the offering of the bikkurim, the First Fruits, when the offeror tells the story of where he came from and where he is, and where he is going? Doesn’t it all tie together? That building a people with a personal and global mission requires, first and foremost, a keen sense of time?
After all, is not individual and communal human identity fundamentally tied to a sense of continuity — a coherent story of “who I was, who I am, and who I might become?“
Is this not one of the basic building blocks of each person and the Jewish people as a whole?