This week’s Parshah includes the terrible punishments that will befall us if we fail to live to up to our obligations.
The first description of curse reads, “But if you will not listen to Me …. I will assign upon you ‘behola’”. What exactly is ‘behola’? It’s not an easy word to accurately translate; turmoil, confusion, hastiness, being out of control of one’s own life, hustle and bustle. Its opposite is serenity. On the surface it would seem that we, thank G-d, are removed from such a terrible curse as we are blessed with so many things that equip us for tranquillity.
Yet Rav Zalman Sorotzkin quoting his nephew makes a powerful observation on our lives. Writing in the 1950’s, in peaceful years after the turmoil of the World Wars, he notes how much we are living in ‘behola’. He writes how the years of horse and wagon travel are gone – no one in his lifetime even remembers such transportation. Yet with the advent of cars, trains and aeroplanes – items that surely should give us a heightened level of serenity; after all they save us so much time and discomfort – we have become subjected to the exact opposite. In place of a journey of several hours between cities that would have been ridden with glitches, we now just step into a car and it takes perhaps an hour or two, yet if there is a hold up of traffic that delays us for even a few minutes we are so frustrated and impatient.
In the days when we expected things to take a while then we were trained in ‘savlanus’ – often translated as patience. But ‘savlanus’ is also related to the word ‘sovel’ – to bear. If we have ‘savlanus’ then we have the ability to bear, and manage in every situation. But now with the speed that we can achieve things we seem to be losing the ability of having inner peace of mind. On the contrary we are full of ‘behola’ – turmoil. We seem stuck in the ‘rat race’, constantly bombarded and pushed around.
One morning at 6:30am I walked past a local McDonald’s takeaway. This particular McDonald’s is open 24hrs and even has a ‘drive thru’. How wonderful that on the way to work at 6:30am without even getting out of your car you can buy your hot ‘fleishig’ breakfast. Presumably people must be rolling in to work relaxed like never before. But evident in the queue this morning was a lot of frustration. I sensed and saw anxious drivers annoyed at having to queue.
The statistics that have been compiled are shocking. “40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.” This phenomena is so real that it translates into real money, “If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year”.
The average person receives so many texts, emails, WhatsApps, tweets and the like, such that in place of technology making more time in his day, he becomes totally immersed in responding – we have created our own state of ‘behola’. People regularly yell and scream at devices and machines – we have lost our minds. It has been fulfilled on us the curse of Kayin (son of Adam) who was told that he would be tossed to and fro in this world [Beraishis 4:12].
We may reason, suggests Rav Zalman Sorotzkin that this is the unfortunate price to pay for our technological advancement. There used to be a once-a-week washing day which took up the entire day, and now we have a washing machine that does the job in 95% of the time. The price to pay was that we became more ‘behola’ but the overall gain is worth it. NO! NO! The very first curse in the long list of curses is that we will be in a state of turmoil – to lose our peace of mind.
In Proverbs we read, “If an inheritance is seized hastily (behola) in the beginning, its end will not be blessed”. This refers to the Tribe of Gad and Reuvain who wanted to inherit the Transjordan. The presentation of their request revealed a shortcoming in their priorities. They said they wanted the Transjordan, “to build pens for their animals and cities for their children”, implying that their chattels and assets were more important to them than their children, an attitude that Moshe corrected them on and censured them harshly. Our verse in Proverbs is referring to this incident, they seized the inheritance of the Transjordan hastily – they acted with ‘behola’ by giving priority to the animals ahead of the children. Because of this they did not enjoy blessing and were sent into exile years ahead of the rest of the Jews living in Eretz Yisroel.
A similar display of ‘behola’ is seen when the spies came forward with their request to send spies to the Land of Israel. The Rabbis pick up on the change of language used by the spies, “All of you approached me” compared to “all the heads of your tribes and your elders approached me” used after the Giving of the Torah. Herein lies the disastrous outcome of the spy’s mission. The people approached Moshe in a disorderly, disrespectful manner, with young people pushing ahead of the elders, and older people pushing ahead of leaders. As Rav Dessler concludes from this incident in his book Strive for Truth, “It is possible to detect the true motivation for any act by observing the way it presents itself to our mind. If it comes in haste and confusion it is sure to originate from the prompting of the Evil Inclination. That which derives from the Good inclination is sure to present itself with calm deliberation, composure and tranquillity”.
May we be blessed in this “Exponential Age” [of technological advances – read: “behola” as it is being called], not to lose our peace of mind.
Good Shabbos,
Yaakov