Yes, I got that header right. The Fiddler song is “Sunrise, Sunset” but the famous poem on Yom-Kippur eve titled “Yaaleh” is “Sunset, Sunrise, Evening” because it captures the 25 hours of Yom-Kippur, which like all Jewish calendar days begins at sunset of the evening prior.
Sunsets and sunrises are fixed by nature, there’s nothing we can do to stop the march of time. But we do have control of how we deal with time – that part is up to us.
This is also the theme of a new, upcoming film titled “Taking Flight” by a UAlbany student Jeremy Wallace. It’s coming out later this Fall, but the trailer is already up on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcllvAM-TfM Kudos to Jeremy for putting together a film of this caliber. I’m not sure of the whole story, but how we deal with time, its pressures, demand and opportunities, can really affect our lives in very profound ways.
Talk of taking flight: Last winter I flew to Manchester England. On the flight I saw a German documentary about time, tension, rapid progress and its many stressors in modern society. One line stuck out for me. A German philosopher or sociologist made this observation: “The Digital Age runs on a beat, while nature runs on rhythms. The beat is constant, unrelenting, while rhythms have repeating patterns.” This reminded me of Shabbos, and the break in the digital beat, a gap that allows us to catch our breath and draw on something deeper, continuing the rhythm, not just the beat.