Parashat Noah- Our Most Precious Commodity
**Shabbat Candle lighting Time in NYC, Friday Oct 31st 2008: 5:34 PM
**Minha, Seudat Shelishit, Derasha, and Arbit on Shabbat Nov. 1st starts at 4:30 PM
The Torah at the beginning of Parashat Noah describes the generation of the flood as a corrupt, depraved and immoral society, a society of crime and sinfulness that God ultimately decided to eliminate.
How did the people of the time deteriorate to this point of immoral conduct? How did this happen? To what may we point as the root cause of the spiritual degeneration of the people at this time?
The likely answer is found toward the end of Parashat Bereshit, where we find a verse that provides the background to the story of the flood. Upon Noah’s birth, his father, Lemech, declared, "Zeh Yenahamenu Mi’ma’asenu U’me’isevon Yadenu" – "This one shall give us respite from our work and the sorrow of our hands" (5:29). Ever since the sin of Adam, God cursed the land, such that man encountered great difficulty producing food. Lemech foresaw that Noah’s birth will herald a new era, a period when farming will become easier. Indeed, Noah invented a number of tools – such as the plow and the sickle – that enabled mankind to till the land and produce food with far less effort than was previously required.
The blessing of easier farming resulted in the emergence of free time. Finally, people did not spend all their time in the endless drudgery of making a living. For once, they had time for other pursuits, for other interests, for other activities. This was a great blessing. People now had the time and peace of mind to develop themselves spiritually, to engage in contemplation, study and prayer. Sadly, however, they made the tragic mistake of using this free time for crime and immorality. Whereas previously, nobody had the time or energy to care about what their neighbors had, now they started to pay more attention to their peers. This resulted in jealousy, which in turn led to the theft and murder. Until now, people had no time for mischief, but with the advent of an easier workload, they filled their time with decadence.
Our generation is similarly plagued by the misuse of free time. Labor laws and technology have given us the great blessing of free time. We are no longer required to work 14-hour workdays six or seven days a week, and employers are obligated by law to give vacation time. Travel has become immeasurably faster, easier and more convenient, as have simple tasks and chores such as sending a letter and warming up dinner. We now have lots of free time, time which the entertainment and travel industries seek to fill with all kinds of meaningless and wasteful activities.
Time is our most precious commodity. God gives us life in order to spend it productively, fill it with meaning, and earn our share in the world to come. Unfathomably, today people look to "kill time," to destroy the most precious asset of all. It would be no exaggeration to call this a form of suicide. Wasting time means taking away precious moments from our life. Is this not murder? Aren’t we killing ourselves by destroying hours and days and weeks of our lives by spending them wastefully?
The Kotzker Rebbe (Rabbi Menachem Mendel Morgenstern, Poland, 1787-1859) was once asked, what is the most critical moment of a person’s life? He replied, "The present moment." The past cannot be changed, and the future has not yet arrived. The most important moment is therefore the present moment, which a person can choose to either use wisely, or squander.
One of the cruel tricks of the Yeser Ha’ra (evil inclination) is to divert our attention away from the present, to have us focus on the past or the present. If we dwell excessively on the past, or obsess with anxiety or anticipation over the future, we are wasting the present. Rather than making most of the opportunities in front of us, we are stuck in the past or in the future. When a person stands on the platform waiting for a train, the Yeser Ha’ra tells him that this is what he should do with the present: he should simply wait for a train. But if a person spends those moments learning Torah, then he has transformed those moments into an intrinsically meaningful experience. Instead of living for the future, he is living in the present.
The Hafetz Haim (Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan, 1839-1933) compared life to a postcard. When people write a postcard to their friends, they begin writing in big letters, but soon realize that they are running out of space. So they start writing in tiny print in order to use their space as efficiently as possible. Similarly, the Hafetz Haim lamented, people tend to waste the best years of their life in vanity. It is only when they grow older and begin seeing the end of the "postcard" that they quickly try to make up the lost time. But time, unlike all other commodities, can never be retrieved or replaced. Once it has been squandered, it is lost forever.
Let us therefore not make the mistake of wasting our time. In today’s day and age we are blessed with the gift of free time; let us ensure that this blessing does not become a curse, that it does not become our undoing. And if God sees that we use the great gift of life wisely and productively, then He will, hopefully, continue to grant us this blessing, and extend our lives so that we will have even more time to and more opportunities to serve Him, Amen.
