Meaning, Memory & Perception of Time - Torah Portion Vayetze
Jacob offers to work for Laban, for the privilege of marrying his daughter Rachel. The Torah says after the fact: "Jacob worked seven years for Rachel, but they seemed in his eyes like a few days, in his love for her." (Gen 29:20) But why did it seem so quick? Shouldn't it be the opposite? If you can't wait to be finished, and you're just counting the days, watching the clock, time can feel brutally slow. Think about sitting in school counting the minutes for class to end, or being in the hospital waiting for the doctor to come. When you're just waiting, it feels like an eternity. Like the expression goes, "A watched pot never boils." How about a "watched Rachel"? Time-perception studies in psychology and neuroscience try to understand when and why we experience time as moving slowly or quickly. It turns out that "slow-moving" time is in fact a more accurate assessment of clock time. It's when we perceive "...