Rabbi Hillel’s admonition, “If not now, when,” is one by which I have tried to live my life. So is
Rabbi Tarfon’s charge that “you are not obliged to complete the work, but neither are you free
to desist from it.” Or Martin Luther King, Jr.’s challenge to embrace the “fierce urgency of now.”
The takeaway is straightforward: make every day of our lives count.
Hillel’s words are as relevant now as they ever were. Our world feels like it’s coming apart at the
seams. Our politics are polarized. Communities, neighborhoods, and even our families are
plagued by chasms. Rather than do the urgent and difficult work of rationally resolving our
problems and differences, we’ve allowed problems to fester until they are insoluble.
Human nature is expert in kicking the can down the road. The older (or wiser) we become, the
more we understand that postponing a difficult decision only makes that decision more difficult
when it is inevitably made.
The words of Hillel, King, and Tarfon offer us profound guidance on how to allocate the short
time we are given in this life. Whether it’s war and peace, the climate crisis, the punishing
economic disparities that plague today’s world; or the rifts among friends or in our own
households; now is the time to act.
Father Amde Hamilton one of the founders of the Watts Prophets, a political poetry group that
emerged out of the 1965 Watts uprising, put it bluntly:
Now is now. Now is Now. Now is now.
Right this moment you can do something old
Or you can do something new
But now is now
Yesterday went away
The past is history
The future is mystery
What are we going to do with now?
Zev Yaroslavsky served on the Los Angeles City Council, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and is the Director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.
For Every Jewel There is a Question:
What are you going to do with now?
