Description
Moment of Moments – By Rabbi Pinchas Winston
PEOPLE WHO REACH their 90th birthday will have lived approximately 67 times 365 days plus 22 times 366 days, or 24,455 + 8,052 = 32,507 days. Multiply that sum by 24 hours per day, then by 60 minutes each hour, and finally by 60 seconds each minute, and the product becomes an incredible almost THREE TRILLION (2,808,604,800) seconds.
And yet an entire life can be MADE or BROKEN in any ONE of those moments. Although the moment itself can be years in the making, the life-altering moment itself will be but a step across a narrow threshold of time. The road to a decision may be long, but the actual decision, once made, is like the flick of a switch. You can call it the “moment of moments.”
The Talmud says something similar here:
There are some who acquire their world after many years, and there are some who acquire their world in a SINGLE MOMENT. (Avodah Za-ah 17a)
This is hard to comprehend. A moment of time can always be subdivided into ever smaller units of time AD INFINITUM, and in that respect it is INFINITE. Yet things happen. Changes occur. One moment a thing is something, and the next moment it is something else. Although the buildup to a change may take what seems like an eternity, there is a very SPECIFIC and EXACT moment—the THRESHOLD OF TIME—when something stops being what it previously was and in actuality becomes something new.
It may be impossible to calculate exactly when that moment will be, is, or was, but for humans that isn’t necessary anyway. What IS necessary is to be REA-DY for it whenever it does occur, and for THAT there is usually enough time for the person who cares.
The Talmud is basically saying this:
A person only sins when a spirit of insanity enters him. (Sotah 3a)
But are insane people responsible for their actions? If not, then why would they be culpable for their sins?
The answer is that they are not, at least not for the act of the sin per se. Starving people will have a difficult time sticking to their diets at a fancy wedding. Gabby people will have difficulty not speaking loshon hara among others who do. To quote the Talmud:
This is comparable to a person who had a son, whom he bathed and anointed, fed and gave drink. Then he hung a purse around his neck and brought his son to the entrance of a brothel. What could the son do to avoid sinning? (Brochos 32a)
Not too much. By that time the son was a proverbial sitting duck for his yetzer hara. The father in the story handed his son over to the Satan on a silver platter, making him more a victim than a culprit, like everyone else who finds himself in too difficult a spiritual test. So again, why are such people deemed guilty of sin when they fail the test?
Because the Talmud is saying in both places that if you want to avoid sin, then you have to think ahead and avoid the things that lead to it. As it says:
Who is a wise person? One who sees what is being born. (Tamid 32a)
The “wise person,” the Talmud is saying, projects the current situation into the future, to be ready for it. If you want to stick to your diet at a feast, then don’t go to it hungry. If you want to avoid speaking loshon hara, then stay away from people who speak it. If you want to avoid sin, then consider where and how it occurs, and avoid those places and situations as much as is reasonably possible.
In other words, it’s not for the actual act of sin that people are punished if overcome by their yetzer haras at the moment of truth. They’re guilty of the “sin” of not having anticipated the test and preparing for it in advance .
This can be made more clear by considering two passengers in a car, one in the front seat looking ahead and one in the back seat looking out the side window. The person looking ahead will see objects as they come toward the car and will be ready for them when they pass.
But the person in the back seat, who is looking out the side window, will only see the same objects when they disappear in a flash. Such people are never ready for the objects and may only realize what they really were after they vanish and can no longer be appreciated or dealt with. Life will be tense and perhaps frustrating.
The whole point of wisdom is to make us aware of important opportunities for getting the most out of life. In order to do that we have to first know what is important and then how to effectively go after it—and that takes a wise person.
Only people who do this can know how to look at the events of today and project them into the future for a potential impact on their lives. Everyone else will just drift through such events, remaining oblivious of their potential for good or bad until well after the time it is possible to harness the good or avoid the bad.
Life is made up of an INCREDIBLE number of decisions, but only a handful—perhaps even just one—can determine the ENTIRE fate of a person both in THIS world AND the next one. People have either lived or died because of a single decision which FOREVER changes their lives and often the lives of others as well.
But we know this already. So many times we have really wanted something and knew that getting it could come down to a single thing we said or did. We are sometimes aware that a critical moment of success or failure is approaching, and that how we respond can determine something one way or the other. Stories have been told, books have been written, and movies have been made about countless momentous moments.
But those were the obvious ones, mostly because they occurred in the past, and retroactively we could figure out what caused them and what went right or wrong. Far more have gone undetected because we are not clear what they were or how they may have caused a good or bad outcome. Since we didn’t know about them in advance, we weren’t ready for them when they came, and didn’t even know that they had already passed.
And then there are those yet to come, and in particular, one MAJOR future moment. The unnerving thing about this is that it may actually be happening already or, even worse, may have already occurred. Either consciously or unconsciously we made a choice that determined whether or not we will survive the Messianic Era and beyond.
For years now we have been making decisions that determined our outlook on life and history, and THESE decisions are shaping our future today. They are the lens through which we examine the events occurring in our life and which direct our response to them. Is God involved? Is He not involved? Are these messianic times? Are they not messianic times?
It is important to point out, therefore, that if we have previously decided incorrectly, we will continue to decide incorrectly, no matter how much we think we are deciding correctly…no matter how confident we may be in our decision-making ability. So when THE moment of truth finally arrives, and it WILL, now sooner than later, we’ll either run to it or be run over by it. Which it will be depends on how correctly we have decided until now…in advance of that moment.
But how can we know?
That’s what this book is about.
