Our Rabbi's Message
June 19th 2009
By Rabbi Aaron KriegelOur Talmud class concluded the year with an analysis of the Children of Israel who lived in the wilderness after their miraculous escape from the land of Egypt where they were slaves to Pharaoh for more than two hundred years. They lamented their freedom. They looked back at their years of slavery with fondness. Whatever they had there was better in their eyes than what they were saddled with in the desert. They chose to eat irregular meals of whatever the Egyptians threw out than constant meals of manna. They chose to live with the uncertainties that slavery brings. They did not know if they would be chosen for a task that would take their very lives. They did not know if they were among a group of people whose homes would be seized for a building project, whose lives would be seized because they were a potential threat to the kingdom. The children of the wilderness knew just one thing for sure. They were as unhappy as they could be living in the desert. They did not like their leader, Moses. They preferred Pharaoh. They did not like their God Who redeemed them. They preferred a golden calf.
They embraced their past and were ready to cast off their future. They hated life. They hated their present circumstances. They hated the fact that they did not have to leave Egypt, but that Moses forced them to leave. Undoubtedly life for them was difficult. Yet out of the difficulties and their rejection of their present situation they developed a love for slavery and a dislike for their future. Is it any wonder that the Rabbis of the Talmud concluded that they had no place in the world to come? How could they. By their very statements they had contempt for the future and the world to come was a future idea. They had but contempt for the world in which they lived. With that contempt they denied themselves a future in this world and in the world to come.
Our teachers had a relative view of good and bad. They held not that every bad person would suffer the same fate and every good person would enjoy the same reward. Rather they held that people are judged and judge themselves by the way they judge others. People who are super critical will be judged by super critical standards. People who love others will be judged in a loving way.
People who have contempt for their present and their future in this world will be denied a portion of the world to come.
The bottom line is this. We have to make the most of the portion we are granted. God will judge us by the standards that we use to judge the blessings that we do have.
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