Continuing to journey while holding onto our faith and hope (Beha'alotecha)
While the citizens of Israel prepare for a tense Shabbat while also expressing thanks to God and to our heroic soldiers, pilots and secret agents for a truly remarkable military operation to halt the efforts of our vicious enemies, here is a thought which I prepared yesterday afternoon which I believe speaks meaningfully to these dizzying and unpredictable times:
I wanted to just share a thought which is so simple yet so important for these times, and which is inspired by Rav Soloveitchik’s majestic examination of Parshat Beha’alotecha which, as he notes, begins with such great hopes for the Jewish people as they are journeying towards the land of Israel:
As Rav Soloveitchik explains, “when I read this Parasha, it attracts me; there is something moving, touching. Sometimes I want to cry when I read this Parasha. The simplicity with which the great Moshe, the master of all wise men and the father of all prophets speaks to his father-in-law Yitro. He uses the grammatical first person: We are setting out…come with us. Moshe was certain and there was not even a shadow of doubt in his mind that he was going to enter the promised land. But then the great tragedy happened. The great triumphal final march suddenly came to a stop and Moshe felt intuitively that the great march had come to an end. Hopes he had would remain unfulfilled and visions he had would remain unrealized.”
Then, Rav Soloveitchik references about the death of his beloved wife: “I remember from my own experience, during the illness of my wife, who was sick for four years. Of course, I am a realist, and it is very hard to fool me. But somehow, I was convinced that she would manage to get out of it. And I lived with hope and tremendous unlimited faith.”
But then he describes a moment, on the Yom Kippur before she died, when he realized that it wasn’t to be, and he reflected on the stark transition from feeling hope filled to feeling hopeless.
11 years ago, when the three boys (Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaer, and Naftali Fraenkel hy’d) were snatched, we were all filled with hope that they would return alive. But then, heartbreakingly, those hopes were dashed. And in terms of the past 20 months, I’ve lost count of the amount of times when great hopes have been snatched and instead of live hostages returning home, we’ve had to wrestle with immense feelings of pain and loss.
Yet despite Parshat Beha’alotecha describing the rollercoaster of hope and expectation to ache and unrealized dreams, the Jewish people nevertheless continued our journey.
Rabbi Sacks explains in “Faith is the ability to live without losing trust in the promise; to experience disappointment without losing hope, to know that the road between the real and the ideal is long, and yet be willing to undertake the journey.”
Yes, we have suffered many disappointments. But yes, we continue to journey while holding onto our faith and hope.
Shabbat Shalom.
Rav Johnny Solomon
LINKS
To join my daf yomi whatsapp group to receive my daily daf yomi insight, click below:
To book a Spiritual Coaching or Halachic Consultation session with me @ WebYeshiva.org, click below:
To make a donation to support my work, click below: