If not now, then how about some other time?

On a famous saying and finding purpose in a tough (Jewish) year.

An AI depiction of Hillel the Elder studying Torah

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This is a guest essay written by Hal Niedzviecki, an author of 12 books of fiction and nonfiction.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Editor’s Note: This essay is adapted from Hal Niedzviecki’s memoir-in-progress, “Darker Country: Memories, Madness and the March of the Living” (upcoming from Cormorant Books).

On a beautiful day, I slowly circle my alma mater, the University of Toronto.

It’s a cycle journey I like to take once a month. I cruise past Hart House, then head over to check out Front Campus, all the while reviving my fading reminiscences — those wild and crazy days when I was young and eager to learn and possibly certifiable and certainly uncertain and about to meet the woman I would eventually make a life with.

Brings up, you know, just a few memories.

But on this particular day, Front Campus is barely recognizable, barely accessible. The large grass circle framed by the road that leads to University College is surrounded by a blue fence. Inside the fence there are scraggly tents and an equally scraggly group of maybe 30 or so people.

Faces obscured by keffiyehs¹, the penned in occupants wander aimlessly around, some of them holding up signs, others sipping from plastic water bottles while sunning themselves next to various banners.

“From the River to the Sea,” I read. “Glory to Martyrs.” “This is the Intifada.” A protestor with his face covered by a black mask holds a sign asking: “If not now, when?”

I stare blankly at the spectacle, too numb to even feel rage.

“Zionism = Racism” is chalked on the road in big colourful letters. I pedal over the words, feeling the stare of the cadre of security guards who flank the wide stone steps of University College.

A few days later, in the car, on an errand to drop my kid off at her friend’s house, I drive up Bathurst Street. We move slowly through heavy traffic past the fast food joints on St. Clair, past the street where my wife grew up, past the kosher restaurant crammed in next to the equally crammed and dusty Hasidic bookstore.

Inching up the big hill I see a giant sign standing in front of the giant synagogue where my now wife had her Bat Mitzvah. There it is again, I mutter angrily. “If not now, when?” kid number two asks uncomprehendingly.

The year is 5784², daughter number two is 12 years old, and that stupid saying, nominally Jewish, is suddenly everywhere. Ambiguous as it is, it seems to be serving the purposes of all sides of the religio-politico spectrum.

To me it’s become a kind of Yoda-Yiddishese, evoking calls for peace, war, and for everything else in between. But just like this never-ending year, it’s also taking on the feeling of a taunt, a saccharine-infused thought-bubble about to burst in my face. “If not you, who?” demands the little devil-dybbuk³ I often imagine lives on my shoulder. Who me? What does any of this have to do with me? All I want is for this horrible, no good year to end.

For the record, this has not been a particularly good calendar year for the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, myself amongst them. In fact, it’s been a terrible year. Since October 7th, it’s been days of dread: a muted, party-free Hannukah, candles barely shining through the ensuing long dark winter — brought to you by encampment sloganeers, ahistorical academics shilling for the so-called “resistance,” and your local branch of feminists-and-queers-for-Jihad.

Regardless, far from any war zone, life goes on, the little (im)perfect life of my family, my loved ones, my work. But life, even outside age old irrational hate, can be unexpectedly trying. I want to put my head down and write. I want to restore my equilibrium, tamp down on my anxiety and convince myself that the sky isn’t falling. The only problem is that every time I look up, something unexpected falls out of the sky.

In December 2023, two months after Hamas attacked Israel and slaughtered more than a thousand, about a month after Israel invaded Gaza in response, news came that my uncle had died. Uncle Albert, the middle child of my paternal grandparents.

He was in his 70s, had a stroke, they found him slumped by his computer where he spent most of his retirement years watching South Korean soap operas and slurping Ramen noodles. His death was a shock, not just because it was unexpected but also because it was the first death from that baby boomer generation born to my Holocaust surviving grandparents. It was like a window that I knew was always going to close had suddenly been slammed shut.

Soon after, 5784 brought word that my old friend from high school Rabbi Charles “Chuckles” Buckholtz had had a seizure and was in a coma. Rabbi Chuck, a relentless proponent for next-generation Diaspora Judaism.

Throughout the many years, I effectively ignored my heritage, he’d been a leader at the Hillel House of the University of Maryland. (Essentially Jewish community centres on campus, almost all major universities have these modest retreats which take as their motto the emblematic quote — “God says: If you come to my house, I will come to yours.” Naturally these foul outposts of foreign influence were besieged by protestors, graffiti and even full out rampages over the course of this oh-so-joyous year.)

Rabbi Chuck, a man of peace if there ever was one, I dearly want to ask him what he thinks of all that is transpiring. What should I — a man of torment and anger who had always worked hard not to be too Jewish, to be in some inchoate way not defined by my Jewishness — think and do now? Would he want me to pray?

Prayer, so far, hasn’t brought the hostages back. My brother prays, but a few weeks after finding out about Chuck, my brother ends up at at Sunnybrook Health in the emergency room. He’s had a brain bleed. My only brother, 53, just a year and a half older than me, my other half, my spiritual doppelganger. We share a bond that only siblings can — we are exactly opposite in most everything, but nevertheless perfectly understand each other.

Brother!

He claims to believe in God, keeps kosher, goes to synagogue every Sabbath. He educated his children at Orthodox Jewish schools and camps and arranged for all three of them to move permanently to Israel (what Jews call “making Aliyah”) where he says he will one day join them.

Is it some kind of sign, I ask myself as I drive to the hospital the next day, that the two most Jewish men in my life are both on death’s door in the year 5784? This same year of Jewish dread? The same year I proposed to write a book about how my family has had to carry the heavy weight of being Jewish all through the 20th century, my family, staggering through the millennium like poor old Tevye driven out of town by yet another pointless pogrom?

By the time I get to the hospital, my brother has been moved out of emergency to a neurology ICU on the third floor of a complex that stretches several city blocks wide. He is awake, sort of, and conscious, sort of. He has a catheter and keeps saying he needs to pee. He does not know where he is or why he is there. He’s not hungry — a first for the big man. He is thirsty but is not supposed to drink due to some upcoming test to figure out what the hell is going on with him.

I stand at the edge of the hospital bed. “I need to pee,” my brother mumbles for the third time since I got there. The nurses are at another bed yelling — “Mr. Hakim, open your eyes. Wake up Mr. Hakim! Open your eyes Mr. Hakim!” That their sole medical intervention seems to be poking poor Mr. Hakim in the ribs is not at all comforting.

A few hours later, after creeping along uptown Yonge Street on my way back home from the hospital, I get home and find myself unexpectedly unoccupied. Unexpectedly because, as the house husband/primary caregiver who imagines himself to be much put upon, it’s the rare evening when I’m not running kid two to the hockey rink, walking the dog, making dinner, cleaning up from dinner, unclogging the weirdly clog-prone upstairs toilet and figuring out how to get back a file that my wife has suddenly realized she accidentally deleted the week before but now requires urgently as in right-this-second.

Overcome with the strange quietude infecting the household, I do something I haven’t done since junior high. I take to the study of Jewish history. I decide to find who or what was originally behind the annoying slogan that’s been ringing in my ears. For my final witness in the trial of 5784, I call to the stand the phrase — “And if not now, when?”

In my office, lights off, the fading day seeping through the shuttered windows, I find the full quote, pull it up out of the interconnected ether of bytes and their bits with the ease of a few keystrokes and clicks of the mouse. There it is, I think to myself. Right there on my computer screen. Surprise surprise, it’s Hillel again and it’s beautiful.

Like all great aphorisms, its near mystical connotations can be parsed in many ways. “If I am not for myself,” one Hillel of Judea purportedly wrote, “who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”

In other words, I’m going to be my own number-one cheerleader, but to do that I need to open myself up to the other, I need to move away from being “only myself.”

Holy contradiction, Hillel!

And if that wasn’t perplexing enough, I have a time limit on all this. Quit putting it off, nothing lasts forever, memento mori⁴, so get down to being you, being for you, being your best you — by being not for you, or at least not just for you.

Honestly, I think it’s brilliant. Especially the “now” part. Great advice from the ancient sage Hillel. Get on with it! If not now, then when are you going to jump into the unknown of who you are, what you will be, and how you will be it?

I feel a surge of excitement. Is this it? Is this the sign? I’ve got to write all this down right now!

No more prevarication, no more sitting in front of the computer’s blank screen wondering what’s going to happen if I actually dare to start digging into the past. But then: “Wait a little longer,” the devil whispers. “Your friend the rabbi might die, your brother might be brain addled, your parents and their remaining siblings and cousins will get older and older and more infirm. You won’t be able to tell the story, because nobody will be left to tell it to you. You’ll be off the hook. Absolved. Nobody wants to hear about all this dreck and misery anyway. It’s too late. Why even bother?”

Yes. That makes sense too. Inspiring quotes are easy to find on the internet, like Nazis and cute pet trick videos. The best thing — the only thing to do is ignore them.

But the house is still dark and quiet, so I read on. Hillel the Elder, crafter of pithy quotations for ancient 21st-century grievances, born somewhere in ancient Babylon around 110 or so BCE. Not much is known about his “early” life, but we do know that when he got to Jerusalem around the year 70 BCE he was broke, underfed, bony.

Already middle-aged, much older than most of his fellow students, and without a penny to his name, he takes up the study of Torah. Before long, he becomes renowned for his insights. He becomes one of the great sages of the day, and, indeed, of all time.

I imagine him as trending toward wizened, his face prematurely aged, his sunken eyes, surrounded by wrinkles, soulful and penetrating. The kind of guy you listen to when he talks. Listen, he seems to be saying in his epigraphic way. I’ve done things. I’ve been around the Babylonian block. You want to know what matters? Hillel sums it up — “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation. Go and study it.”

That’s it. Don’t be an a**hole. Now go read.

As Hillel flourished, so too did the Jewish religion. The primarily oral culture of the time flourished. Hillel and his fellow scholars pored over the Torah and codified its extensive rules on how to live properly as a Jew.

Still today people are reading and writing entire books based on Hillel’s sayings. He left behind what were most likely the first-ever aphorisms. He basically invented the secular moral code of “be nice to people, and they’ll be nice to you” — the most sensible, neighborly advice of all time.

And he went by one freaking name, for god’s sake! By the time Hillel died at the supposedly ripe old age of 120 (the same age as Moses when he died while looking over the land of milk and honey) he was an ancient times rock star, the Billy Graham of Roman-era Judea.

So maybe, just maybe, I think to myself as the darkness invades my suddenly lonely office, it isn’t too late. If Hillel can show up at age 40 and establish himself as the prominent commentator on all things Jewish and Torah in a few short years, who’s to say that I can’t figure out a few things about my family’s Jewish history at age 50-plus?

It’s not about career, or literary greatness, or some inspiriting slogan motivating you to seize the day and do your dreams. It’s about the simple truth that Hillel mastered. We’re all neighbors. We should know each other’s stories. We should understand each other outside of time. If not now, then why bother with the when? It’s as simple as that, isn’t it?

“Think of the children,” dear dybbuk leers mockingly. “Exactly,” I snap back.

The children. For my kids, I need to tell the story before it’s too late. For them, I must drag the secrets into the light. I want the sunshine to extinguish the shadows and reveal the monsters, the dybbuks, on our shoulder.

Is it for them I shall try to rouse myself for one last long interminable wrestle with my demons, my dear ancient sage Hillel?

No, of course not. It’s for me. Or is it for I? Or you?

If not now — when?

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1. A traditional headdress worn by men from parts of the Middle East

2. According to the Jewish calendar

3. In Jewish mythology, a dybbuk is a malicious possessing spirit believed to be the dislocated soul of a dead person. It supposedly leaves the host body once it has accomplished its goal, sometimes after being exorcised.

4. Latin for “Remember you must die”