WHY THE JOURNEY OF LIFE?

The coach had put together the perfect team for the Chicago Bears. The only thing that was missing was a good quarterback. He had scouted all the colleges and even the Canadian and European Leagues but couldn't find the guy to ensure a Super Bowl win.

Then one night while watching CNN he saw a war-zone scene in Gaza. He spotted a young Israeli soldier with a truly incredible arm in one corner of the background. He threw a hand grenade straight into a 15th-story window 100 yards away. KABOOM! He threw another hand grenade 75 yards away, right into a chimney. KA-BLOOEY! Then he threw another at a passing car going 90 mph. BULLS-EYE!

"I've got to get this guy!" The coach said to himself. "He has the perfect arm!" So, he brought him to the States and taught him the great game of football. And the Bears go on to win the Super Bowl.

The young man is hailed as the great hero of football, and when the coach asks him what he wants, all the young man wants is to call his mother.

"Mom," he says into the phone, "I just won the Super Bowl!"

"I don't want to talk to you," the old woman says. “You are not my son!"

"I don't think you understand, Mother," the young man pleads. "I've won the greatest sporting event in the world. I'm here among thousands of my adoring fans."

"No! Let me tell you!" his mother retorts. "At this very moment, there are gunshots all around us. The neighborhood is a pile of rubble. Your two brothers were beaten within an inch of their wives last week, and I must keep your sister in the house, so she doesn't get abused!"

The old lady pauses, and then tearfully says, "I will never forgive you for making us move to Chicago!"

These are the journeys of the children of Israel who went out of the land of Egypt... Moses recorded their travels and encampments, by the command of G-d, in this week's Torah portion Matot Massei.

The Midrash compares G-d’s instruction to Moses to record all the forty-two stations in the nation’s journey from Egypt through the desert to the borders of the Promised Land to the story of a king traveling with his child to seek a cure for the child’s illness. On their return journey, as they passed through the stations as they had originally stopped, the king reminded his child: Here we slept, here we were cooled, here your head hurt.

Three obvious questions come to mind.

1) What was the objective of G-d commanding Moses to recount the entire journey to remember all the places where they fell “ill”?

2) The metaphor does not reflect the biblical story. In the metaphor, father and son on their return home, take the same route as the way there. However, the journey from Egypt to the Holy Land was a one-way journey: the Jews did not return to Egypt, nor did they physically revisit their encampments in the desert.

The Exodus marked our birth as a nation, our entry into the Land of Israel, and the attainment of our national and spiritual maturity.

In this sense, the journey of the Israelites through the desert mirrors the story of every human life. When we are born, we leave a narrow pathway Egypt means narrow pathways of our mother’s womb and we begin a journey through a desert. The human story is the story of a journey through a great and fearsome desert, fraught with physical and spiritual dangers and direfully lacking the waters that quench the thirsting soul of man. In the end, however, despite all the strife and tribulation, we will achieve our objective of a “promised land.”

This is the deeper significance of the “return journey” made by the king and his child in the above-cited parable by the Midrash. True, the journey from Egypt to the Holy Land was a one-way journey; on the eve of their entry into the Holy Land, they were able to look back upon their forty-two encampments and re-experience them in a different light: not as a people venturing from Egyptian slavery toward an unknowable goal through a fearful wilderness, but as a people who, having attained their goal, could now appreciate how each way-station in their journey had forged a particular part of their identity and had contributed to what and where they were today.

The same is true in the human story. At each stage in our life, when we fight our way out of the desert into our own promised land, we too can look back at all the stations of our journey and see them for what they truly were: challenges and opportunities that paved, rather than impeded, our advance through the desert. Rather than the pitfalls and obstacles as we first experienced them, we can recognize them as rungs in the ladder that have raised us to this elevated plateau.

There was a man who had four sons. He wanted his sons to learn not to judge things too quickly. So, he sent them on a quest, in turn, to go and look at a pear tree that was a great distance away.

The first son went in the winter, the second son in the spring, the third son in the summer, and the youngest son in the fall.

When they had all gone and come back, he called them together to describe what they had seen.

The first son said the tree was ugly, bent, and twisted.

The second son said, "No," it was covered with green buds and full of promise.

The third son disagreed; he said it was laden with blossoms that smelled so sweet and beautiful. It was the most graceful thing he had ever seen.

The last son disagreed with them; he said it was ripe and drooping with fruit, full of life and fulfillment.

The man then explained to his sons that they were all right because they had seen only one season in the tree's life.

He told them that you cannot judge a tree, or a person, by only one season, and that the essence of who they are and the pleasure, joy, and love that come from that life can only be measured at the end, when all the seasons are up.

If you give up when it's winter, you will miss the promise of your spring, the beauty of your summer, fulfillment of your fall.

Don't let the pain of one season define all of life. Don't judge life by one difficult season. Persevere through the difficult patches and the better times are sure to come sometime and they may even redefine the challenges of the past.

As the old saying goes: Aspire to inspire before you expire. Happiness keeps you sweet. Trials keep you strong. Sorrows keep you human. Failures keep you humble. Success keeps you glowing. But only G-d keeps you going. Just as in the above parable, it is the father who takes his child and remains with him during each journey.

This is how the Chasam Sofer explains the Almighty's answer to Moshe's request "Show me, please, your glory," to which G-d says, “You will see My back, but My face may not be seen.” What does this mean?

The Talmud explains that Moshe was asking the profound and age-old question: "Why are there righteous people who suffer and wicked people who prosper?" The Almighty responded: “You will see My back, but My face may not be seen." In life, you will not be able to see me in front of you, only behind you. Life cannot be appreciated in foresight, only in hindsight. As you are living your life, and curve balls come your way, you will be clueless as to why this must be part of your journey. Only after you go through your pathways, will you sometimes be able to turn around and say, Ah! Now I see how that encampment was an important stepping stone in my narrative.

Warren Buffet once remarked: “In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.” Ditto with life.

During arduous labor, I may know the result, yet what I am feeling is only the perspiration and the agony. But when I am done with the journey, when I turn around five years later, I can now look back in the rearview mirror of my life, and mentally revisit every place I was in, yet this time I can place it in a different context as an indispensable part of my destination. That is when I can look at the very experience that has caused me headaches and agony and see it as a stepping stone and portal to awareness and liberation.

Steve Jobs said: “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So, you must trust that the dots will somehow connect in the future. You must trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

In life, we can’t always see the path, but we must know that there is a path. One day you and I will turn around and say, ah! What a creative path!

All the realities serve a single purpose: to advance us along the journey of life to our promised land and to imbue the journey with meaning and worth. Today we can only reiterate our knowledge of this truth; on the return journey, we shall revisit these stations and see and experience their true import, how each added so much luster and depth to our lives.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky