Others quoted various verses from the curses in the weekly portions of Bechukotai<\/i> and Ki Tavo<\/i>. There is no paucity of horribly sad verses in those two parshiyot<\/i>. Here are just a few: \u201cI will set my face against you\u2026your foes shall dominate you;\u201d \u201cI will heap your carcasses upon your lifeless fetishes;\u201d \u201cYou shall eat your own issue, the flesh of your sons and daughters.\u201d For these phrases, the adjectives \u201cfrightening\u201d or \u201cterrible\u201d seem more appropriate than \u201csad.\u201d<\/p>\n
For most of the discussion, I remained silent. For, you see, I had long before concluded which Torah verse was the saddest for me. The verse appears in this week\u2019s Torah portion, Parshat<\/i> Va\u2019era<\/i> (Exodus<\/i> 6:2-9:35). It reads, \u201cBut they would not listen to Moses because of their crushed spirit and difficult toil.\u201d (ibid<\/i>. 6:9)<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s understand the context of this verse. In last week\u2019s parsha<\/i>, we read of the first time Moses delivered the message that the redemption was near. The \u201cpeople were convinced.\u201d They believed. They trusted Moses. They \u201cbowed low in homage.\u201d They had hope.<\/p>\n
This week\u2019s parsha<\/i>, however, begins after the Jews knew bitter disappointment. Moses had intervened with Pharaoh, but his intervention backfired. Pharaoh reacted by increasing the burden he placed upon the Jews. He said, \u201cLet heavier work be laid upon the men; let them not pay attention to deceitful promises.\u201d After such disillusionment, the eloquent promises with which this week\u2019s parsha<\/i> begins evoked a very different reaction. Moses\u2019 words were met with disbelief, with a despair that is the result of kotzer ruach<\/i>, a crushed spirit, and avodah kashah<\/i>, <\/i>painfully difficult toil.<\/p>\n
For me, hopelessness is the saddest of human emotions, especially when it follows upon the excitement of hopefulness. The moment when hopes are dashed and dreams abandoned is, for me, the saddest moment of all.<\/p>\n
Ironically, this saddest of all verses gives us the opportunity to learn important lessons about hope and its opposite, despair. To learn these lessons we must scrutinize these two phrases, kotzer ruach <\/i>and avodah kashah<\/i>, which I have thus far translated as \u201ccrushed spirit\u201d and \u201cdifficult toil\u201d. Our great commentators give these phrases different \u201cspins\u201d.<\/p>\n
For example, Rashi understands kotzer ruach <\/i>to mean \u201cshortness of breath\u201d, the result of strenuous physical labor. Can a man who is gasping for air be expected to hope? Of course not. He is so panicked that hope for a better future is totally beyond his capacity.<\/p>\n
Whereas Rashi translates ruach<\/i> as \u201cbreath,\u201d Rabbi Obadiah Sforno, the great Jewish commentator who lived in Italy during its Renaissance, prefers to translate it as \u201cspirit.\u201d For him, it is not \u201cshortness of breath\u201d that deprives a person of hope. Rather, it is the \u201cshortness of spirit,\u201d the absence of a \u201cspirit of faith,\u201d which makes hope so difficult. The Jews lost faith in Moses. He had let them down by failing to provide them with an instant solution to their plight. Thereby they lost their faith in the God of Moses. Without faith, argues Sforno, hope is impossible.<\/p>\n
The 18th-century mystic and ethicist, Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato, understands our verse differently. For him, Pharaoh was the expert par excellence about the processes of despair and discouragement. He knew how to squash hope. He knew why genuine hope is so rare. To keep man from hope, Pharaoh knew, you must keep him so busy with all sorts of tasks and chores that he is too distracted to take the few moments necessary to begin to think of hopeful possibilities.<\/p>\n
This is how Luzzato puts it in his masterpiece, The Path of the Upright <\/i>(Mesillat Yesharim<\/i>):<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is, in fact, one of the cunning artifices of the evil yetzer<\/i>, who always imposes upon men such strenuous tasks that they have no time left to note whither they are drifting\u2026This ingenuity is somewhat like that of Pharaoh, who commanded, \u2018Let heavier work be laid upon the men\u2026\u2019 For Pharaoh\u2019s purpose was not only to prevent the Israelites from having any leisure to make plans against him, but by subjecting them to unceasing toil, to deprive them also of the opportunity to reflect.\u201d<\/p>\n
Without this opportunity\u2014with kotzer ruach<\/i>\u00b8 \u201cshortness of time to reflect\u201d\u2014hopefulness is out of the question. One would be too busy to hope.<\/p>\n
Another insight into the possible meaning of kotzer ruach<\/i> is found in a most unusual source. There exists a collection of brief homilies, authored by Rabbi Kalonymos Kalman Shapira, the Chassidic Rebbe of Piacezna in pre-Holocaust Poland. He recorded these homilies, delivered in the early years of the Warsaw Ghetto, in a little notebook, which miraculously survived those fateful years.<\/p>\n
He writes that under conditions of avodah kashah<\/i>, <\/i>of very difficult toil, one loses the \u201cspirit of life.\u201d Rabbi Shapira knew all too well the meaning of difficult toil, enslaved as he and his \u201ccongregation\u201d were in that horrible ghetto. And he knew how he and they struggled to do God\u2019s will despite their dire straits. He witnessed their attempts to help each other, to maintain faith in God, and to perform whatever ritual mitzvot <\/i>they could. But furthermore, he observed that their tortured souls could not muster the \u201cspirit of life\u201d necessary for religious action. Kotzer ruach<\/i> for him meant the absence of a \u201cspirit of vitality.\u201d For him, religious actions performed without enthusiasm were defective.<\/p>\n
Like the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Jews of ancient Egypt suffered from kotzer ruach<\/i>. They could not respond to Moses with a \u201cspirit of vitality.\u201d No vitality, no life, no hope.<\/p>\n
These commentators lived centuries apart from each other and in very diverse circumstances. But they all teach us this: there are many factors in life that render hope impossible. Some of these factors are cruel and unusual, as exemplified by the slaveries of Egypt and Nazi Germany.<\/p>\n
But some of these factors are common today. They relate to our busy lifestyles, to our work routines, even to the ways we play. We are consumed by \u201cbusyness.\u201d There may be little that slaves can do to free themselves for the possibility of hope. But there is much that we can do to avoid our own \u201cslavery,\u201d to at least limit the avodah kashah <\/i>that leads to kotzer ruach.<\/i><\/p>\n
Reflect upon it. Where there is time for reflection, there are opportunities for hope.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/Weinreb_Tzvi.jpg\")