Description
Just A Moment: Infinite Power To Do Great Things – By Rabbi Pinchas Winston
Just a moment. That’s all it takes, just a moment. In a single moment a person can go from obscurity to stardom, from simple person to hero and, in some cases, to villain. It is amazing how many lives have changed, some for the better, some for the worst, in only a moment.
Most of the time, moments come and go without even being noticed. When we enjoy ourselves, they seem to run out too quickly. When we’re bored, they seem to last forever. But in-between they don’t seem at all because life has us looking somewhere else, and life just slips away, one moment at a time.
The yetzer tov is time conscious. It wants to leave this world having used its time meaningfully, so it tries to remain time-conscious at all times. The yetzer hara wants us to waste our lives, so it does everything it can to get us to waste time. Over millennia of history and billions of people later, the yetzer hara’s job seems a lot easier than the yetzer tov’s.
But every once in a while we’re reminded of the huge impact a moment can have. One of mine came while driving one day and almost running over a pedestrian. I was turning right and he was crossing the road. Not seeing him, I went to make my turn. Assuming I had seen him, he kept on walking, and when I almost hit him he banged my car to let me know his anger.
I immediately looked into my rear view mirror and saw him looking at me as I continued to drive away. I waved at him to say I was sorry, and we both went our respective ways, him upset and me shell-shocked from my brush with an entirely different and scary destiny.
It is over forty years later and I recall the entire incident as clear as day. Clearly I had been traumatized, the result of considering what would have happened to me and my life had I actually hit the person and, even worse, killed him. Even if the judge found me innocent of any charge, which would have been unlikely, how could I live with myself knowing that I had run someone over?
In the end, thank God, I had not hit him, and my life stayed its course. But that has not stopped me from considering how, in a single moment, my life could have been disastrously different, making me into a villain. I don’t think I was ever the same again.
For others, the opposite happened. For example, there are athletes who, in the blink of any eye, did something so spectacular in front of so many people that it instantly made them into a hero. Their bat happened to hit enough of a fast ball to get a game-winning home run just when all seemed lost, or they threw a game-winning touchdown pass with only ten seconds left in the game.
But that’s only sports with few major consequences. There are far more remarkable stories from wartimes during which some people have taken incredible, and often deadly risks to save others, or even an entire country. Sometimes it was planned, sometimes it was a split-second decision, and their heroism remains with us to this very day.
There aren’t too many examples of this in the Torah, but one clearly stands out, the killing of Zimri by Pinchas at the end of Parashas Balak. Not only was his act of zealousness momentous, but either a moment too early or a moment too late, and Pinchas would have become the villain instead of the hero. Instead of winning everything he would have lost it all, this world and the next world, emphasizing the great personal risk he took to right the wrong. Clearly it had been Pinchas’s lucky day.
Or had it? According to the Gemora, six miracles had to have occurred for Pinchas to get it all right, making Pinchas’s success that fateful day anything but luck. The fact that any miracles occurred for him means that God had guaranteed his success when he could not. It was the fulfillment of what the Gemora says elsewhere: If a person comes to purify themself, they (Heaven) help them… if a person sanctifies themself a little, they (Heaven) sanctify them a lot.
This means that if you work on perfecting your “instrument,” the Conductor will fit you into His “orchestra.” If you put the hours in on your own, He will give you your moment to shine. If you’re prepared to spend some days in the shadows, God will give you your day in the sun, and you will be the one to shine.
So, moments are not momentary things. They’re climaxes of many moments of preparation, perhaps even years. It was the daughters of Tzelofchad’s ongoing and increasing love for Eretz Yisroel that earned them honorable mention (more than once) in the most important literary work to have even been created.
Lucky day? No such thing. Everything is a matter of Divine Providence, even the most mundane matters, especially when it impacts history in a significant manner. We might live a hundred years, but very often the quality of our lives comes down to moments, crucial moments, moments that heroes seize because they are ready for them, and the rest of the world overlooks because they aren’t.
[When] Rebi [Yehudah HaNasi heard this story], he wept and said: “There are [those who] acquire their [share in the World to Come only] after many years [of work], and there are [those who] acquire their [portion in the World to Come] in one moment. (Avodah Zarah 17b)
More than likely, it was the many unsung heroic hours of the person that led to their singing heroic moment. And, above all, a much greater portion in the World to Come. Just a moment for an eternity.
