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Don’t Panic! Having Faith At The End Of Days – By Rabbi Pinchas Winston
Panic. No one wants to, but so many people do anyhow. It’s the go-to reaction of most people to a situation that they can’t afford to lose but see no way to win. The irony, and sometimes tragedy, of it is that panic often causes the very result people panic about.
For example, there is the famous episode in the Torah of Mei Merivah:
The entire congregation of the Children of Israel arrived at the desert of Tzin in the first month, and the people settled in Kadesh. Miriam died there and was buried there. The congregation had no water, so they assembled against Moshe and Aharon. The people argued with Moshe and said, “If only we had died with the death of our brothers before God! Why have you brought the congregation of God to this desert so that we and our livestock should die there? Why have you taken us out of Egypt to bring us to this evil place. It is not a place for seeds, or for fig trees, grapevines, or pomegranate trees, and there is no water to drink.” Moshe and Aharon moved away from the assembly to the entrance of the Tent of Meeting, and they fell on their faces. [Then] the glory of God appeared to them. God spoke to Moshe, saying: “Take the staff and assemble the congregation, you and your brother Aharon, and speak to the rock in their presence so that it will give forth its water. You will bring forth water for them from the rock and give the congregation and their livestock to drink.” Moshe took the staff from before the Lord as He had commanded him. Moshe and Aharon assembled the congregation in front of the rock, and he said to them, “Now listen, you rebels, can we draw water for you from this rock?” Moshe raised his hand and struck the rock with his staff twice, when an abundance of water gushed forth, and the congregation and their livestock drank. God said to Moshe and Aharon, “Since you did not have faith in Me to sanctify Me in the eyes of the Children of Israel, you will not bring this assembly to the land which I have given them.” These are the waters of dispute—Mei Merivah—where the Children of Israel contended with God, and He was sanctified through them. (Bamidbar 20:1-13)
It is the shortest story in the Torah with the greatest negative historic impact. According to the Leshem, the decree against Moshe Rabbeinu was the decree against the last person in history who could singlehandedly bring the final redemption. After that, only the nation as a whole can bring Moshiach early, and that hasn’t worked out so well until now.
Needless to say, there is a lot of midrash and kabbalah behind what happened. But on the simplest level, panic was the culprit. The Jewish people panicked when they ran out of water, which is why they demanded water without any emunah attached. Would it have killed them to instead say, “Hey, Moshe, sorry to bother you. We know new water must be on the way. The folks back home were just wondering when they might expect it.”
Moshe Rabbeinu panicked, in his own way, when he responded to the new crisis. It seems that God was not angry about the situation, and that He had set the whole episode up to teach the Jewish people something about life in Eretz Yisroel. Eretz Yisroel is a spiritual land, one which God pays attention to all the time and is therefore more responsive to spiritual acts, such as prayer, than physical ones.
Moshe Rabbeinu saw it more like what he had been used to seeing until that time, as another rebellion of certain elements of the nation against God. It changed the energy of the moment and the opportunity of the time. Instead, Moshe spoke to the rock, but water didn’t come. He hit the rock once, and only blood appeared. Finally, only after hitting the rock a second time did water flow as anticipated.
The people were happy, God was upset, and Moshe was doomed to die in the desert. Calm had been restored, but damage had been irrevocably done, resulting in only one death of Moshe Rabbeinu, but millions upon millions of torturous deaths of the Jewish people throughout the ages. And history is not done yet.
Panic has rarely ever saved anyone except the people who should not have been saved. If damage has been avoided, it has only been by the grace of God Who had mercy on the panicked. Almost every emotional response has both a good application as well as a bad one. It is hard to find both for panic.
How can there be, if panic is the opposite of the goal of life? We’re here to learn that God runs history, and that everything He does, especially for the Jewish people, is for the good. The only reason why we say two brochos, Boruch HaTov v’HaMeitiv on good things and Boruch Dayan HaEmes on bad things now is because we can’t see the good in the bad.
But once the yetzer hara is done and free will is a thing of the past we will, and then we’ll only have to say the one brochah for good. That thing that causes us to now perceive bad as bad will be gone, and with it, our chance to have emunah. Who needs emunah when everything makes sense and seems just?
In fact, panic is the measure of a person’s emunah and success as a human being. The continuum stretches from panic to the far left and emunah to the far right. The more a person panics in life, the less emunah they have. The less they panic in a crisis, the more emunah they have to have.
It is the greatest asset a person can have in life, and therefore the greatest gift a parent can give to a child. In their rush to become free of the “burden” of a relationship with God, Godless society has stripped entire generations of their most important achievement in life, and the most calming factor in life.
The result has been an inordinate amount of fear in life, and a tremendous sense of insecurity of so many people. This has forced many to make terrible moral compromises and spend a lot of money and energy on means of compensation just to survive. We’re left with a very selfish, self-centered modern world on the verge of self-annihilation.
But don’t panic. That won’t happen. God won’t let it. He always steps in when man fails too much and tweaks human history to put it back on track. That’s the good news. The bad news is that was World War II, and before that World War I, and before that, etc. And if ancient prophecies are right, there can still be a World War III, God forbid. We call it Milchemes Gog and Magog—the War of Gog and Magog.
Wouldn’t you rather learn to not panic?
