Something Understood

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BBC Radio 4 LW

Religion & Ethics

Ethical and religious discussion that examines some of the larger questions of life

Ethical and religious discussion that examines some of the larger questions of life, taking a spiritual theme and exploring it through music, prose and poetry

BBC Radio 4 FM

Something Understood: The Time of Our Lives

Immortality

The Time of Our Lives

BBC Radio 4 - Something Understood, The Time of Our Lives

Rabbi Shoshana Boyd Gelfand explores the many ways we measure time and its effect on us.

Rabbi Shoshana Boyd Gelfand draws upon the work of poets, scientists, theologians and songwriters, all of whom have explored the ways we measure time and its effect on us.

Rabbi Shoshana Boyd Gelfand examines the many ways we measure time and its effect on us.

Over the course of the programme, Shoshana draws upon a wide range of sources, from Albert Einstein who argued that the separation between past and present is simply an illusion, to the poetry of the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma who urges us to live only in the moment.

With the help of Gustav Holst's The Planets, we revisit the moment of creation, when time and space were born. Shoshana notes that, while modern scientists theorise that time was created alongside the universe during the Big Bang, a similar claim was made centuries before in the Bible. Scripture doesn't state this explicitly, but the Bible uses the same Hebrew word, "olam", to describe both time and space - suggesting linguistically that they are similar phenomena. In general, "olam" refers to the physical universe, but it also can mean "forever" or "eternity." Shoshana explains that, whether one believes that the world was created through Divine Speech or a Big Bang, both science and the Bible agree that time and space are one. 

For Shoshana, Joni Mitchell's Circle Game offers us valuable insight into the circular patterns that appear with the passage of time, while Gilbert and Sullivan playfully note the failings of our attempt to number our days using the Gregorian calendar. The poetry of Rabindranath Tagore reminds us that lost time is never truly lost, whereas John Milton advises us to square off against time by placing our faith in the divine.

Presenter: Shoshana Boyd Gelfand
Producer: Max O'Brien
A TBI Media production for BBC Radio 4.

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