WHAT TIME IS IT NOW?

The railway is one of the greatest inventions in human history. It conquered distance, accelerated commerce, and made travel safer, cheaper, and more comfortable.

Trains and railways were actually a British creation. In 1804, Cornish mining engineer Richard Trevithick built the first successful steam locomotive to haul a train on rails, at Penydarren in South Wales.

But it wasn’t until twenty-one years later that the engine later known as Locomotion No. 1 hauled the inaugural train on the Stockton and Darlington Railway – the world’s first steam-powered public railway – carrying both freight and passengers. The modern railway age had begun.

Trains rapidly transformed Georgian Britain. Journeys that had taken days could be completed in hours. Goods moved swiftly from factories to ports. People could travel greater distances, more safely, and with a predictability that stagecoach passengers could only have dreamed of.

But almost immediately, the amazing innovation produced a problem no one had anticipated: nobody could agree what time it was.

Until then, every British town had kept its own time, determined by the position of the sun. Noon was the moment when the sun reached its highest point in the local sky. And because the sun reaches eastern towns before western ones, Plymouth was roughly sixteen and a half minutes behind London, while Liverpool was about twelve minutes behind.

This anomaly had never mattered before. If a journey took two days, a few minutes one way or another was no big deal. But trains moved fast and ran according to timetables, and suddenly passengers were traveling between towns whose clocks disagreed.

At one stage, trains on the North Western Railway used Liverpool time on journeys to London, and London time on the return journey, while stations along the route continued to display their own local time.

The difficulty was not that the clocks were inaccurate; it was that there was no shared standard. Every town was correct according to its own position beneath the sun, but a system in which everyone was locally correct had become nationally unworkable.

The railway exposed a problem no one had ever needed to consider before rapid travel brought distant places into constant contact: local time worked while life remained local. The moment the country needed to move together, multiple different local times in such close proximity became impossible.

In 1845, railway businessman Henry Booth petitioned Parliament for “Uniformity of Time.” Railways increasingly adopted Greenwich Mean Time – named for Greenwich, then a town just southeast of London, today part of Greater London.

In 1852, the Royal Observatory at Greenwich began transmitting time signals electrically, and by 1880 Greenwich time had become Britain’s legal standard. Four years later, an international conference selected Greenwich as the world’s Prime Meridian and recommended a global system of time zones based upon it.

Britain’s vast maritime reach and sprawling empire had helped to make Greenwich the obvious choice, and it became the reference point by which time was measured across the world.

But some people resented London imposing its clock on everyone else in Britain. Why should Plymouth abandon a perfectly accurate local time just because Greenwich had been selected as the national standard?

The answer was brutally simple. Either Britain could keep every local time zone, or Britain could run a national railway, with scheduled times that made sense. It could not do both.

History offers an even more dramatic example of what happens when powerful parts refuse to function as a whole. In 105 BCE, Rome sent an enormous army to confront the Cimbri in southern Gaul. It was divided into two powerful forces which, had they acted together, should have presented an overwhelming challenge to the enemy.

But their commanders – Gnaeus Mallius Maximus and Quintus Servilius Caepio – refused to cooperate, mainly because the aristocratic Caepio despised taking orders from the socially inferior Mallius. The two forces camped separately, operated independently, and were both destroyed at the Battle of Arausio, in one of the worst military disasters in all of Roman history.

Rome possessed the strength it needed that day, but that strength was divided – and without unity, each part was destroyed.

This idea lies at the heart of a striking verse in Parshat Re’eh. Moses tells the Jewish people (Deut. 12:8): לֹא תַעֲשׂוּן כְּכֹל אֲשֶׁר אֲנַחְנוּ עֹשִׂים פֹּה הַיּוֹם אִישׁ כָּל־הַיָּשָׁר בְּעֵינָיו – “You shall not continue doing everything that we do here today, each person whatever is right in his own eyes.”

In context, the verse refers to the transitional period before the Israelites were securely settled in the Land of Israel. Rashi explains that “whatever is right in his own eyes” refers specifically to voluntary offerings, which were initially allowed to be brought on private altars.

But the broader message of the passage is unmistakable. Again and again, the Torah directs the nation toward “the place that God will choose.” Once the people were established in the Land, their worship could no longer remain entirely private and local. They needed a shared spiritual center – one place that would unite the entire nation around a common standard.

The tribes would live in different regions and retain their distinct identities, but they would all look toward the same Jerusalem. In a sense, Jerusalem became the Jewish Greenwich.

This was not about imposing bland uniformity. Britain’s towns did not lose their character when they adopted Greenwich time. Liverpool remained Liverpool. Plymouth remained Plymouth. Their accents, customs and civic pride survived, and survive to this day. Only their clocks were coordinated, enabling the country to function as a single whole.

Judaism has always contained extraordinary diversity. Moroccan, Lithuanian, Yemenite, German, Polish, Russian, Syrian and Iraqi Jews all developed different melodies, foods, pronunciations, and customs. That variety is one of the great glories of Jewish history. But difference can enrich a people only when it rests upon a unifying foundation. Diversity without a center is not diversity – it is fragmentation.

We live in an age that celebrates “my truth.” Of course, every person has their own experience and perspective. Two honest people can see the same event differently. But perspective is not the same as truth.

Every British town genuinely experienced noon at a different moment. Plymouth was not lying when it said that its clocks lagged behind London. But no railway could function if every station insisted that its own experience of noon was the only time that mattered.

And the same is true of Jewish life. There is room for personal expression, different customs, and legitimate disagreement. But Judaism cannot mean whatever each individual wants it to mean. The moment “my custom” becomes “Judaism,” we are no longer expressing one tradition in different ways. We are each keeping our own time.

The Torah offers a different model. It does not abolish the tribes; it gives them a center. Rather than demanding that every Jew look and sound the same, it insists that Jewish difference remain anchored to something beyond personal preference.

The railway gave Britain the power to move faster than ever before. But speed without coordination produced confusion. Rome had assembled what should have been an unbeatable army. But strength without unity produced disaster.

The Jewish people possess extraordinary energy, talent and diversity. But all of it must operate within a shared frame of reference: a Torah that is not rewritten by every passing fashion or discarded for personal convenience, and, most importantly, a Jerusalem that remains the spiritual center of Jewish destiny.

A people can live in many places, speak in many accents, and preserve many traditions. But it cannot travel together while every man keeps his own time.