Guarding Every Second

One of the great things about living in Israel is that you hear about all these great books, some of which are even in English, which tell you all sorts of amazing things about all sorts of inspiring people.

Recently, I had the privilege to read an English translation of a biography of the late Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Bender, who was one of the people who helped Rav Arush to become who he now is. 

 
From the time he was born in Russia, at the turn of the last century, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak had a tough life. He lived through periods of starvation, World War 1, shocking typhus epidemics that killed thousands and thousands of people (including two of his own children), the Russian Revolution, the aftermath of the Russian Revolution where violent Ukrainians would try to kill any Jew they could lay their hands on, Stalin, the KGB, and then World War Two. (And I’m leaving out a lot of the ‘minor’ stuff…)
 
Amazingly, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak continued to cling firmly onto G-d and to Breslev chassidut the whole time, even when he was literally risking his life to go to Uman for the traditional gathering by Rebbe Nachman’s grave for Rosh Hashana.
 
After the war, he and his family made it on to the last train out of the city of Samarkand en route to Israel, before the Iron Curtain fell, trapping thousands of Jews behind it for the next fifty years.
 
Rabbi Levi Yitzchak didn’t sit still when he got to the Holy Land: he immediately started reinvigorating Breslev chassidut, ensuring that it had the spiritual and material foundations it needed to flourish into what we now see today.
 
There were many inspiring anecdotes and incidents in that book, but one of the most notable, at least for me, was Rabbi Levi Yitzchak’s use of time. He himself never wasted a minute, which is why even when he was traveling wedged into a cattle cart with hundreds of other people, he knew exactly when to pray the morning, afternoon and evening prayers – every minute was accounted for! He knew that after he’d completed his regular scheduled learning, he was at ‘such-and-such’ point in the day.
 
In the same vein, when he’d hear people talking about the weather, or politics, or some other nonsense, he’d run up to them and ask them: “How is this helping you?” Or, “What about the holy Torah?” He hated wasted even a minute of life.
 
Yesterday, I took my kids in to town to see if there was some nice clothes to buy them for the upcoming Jewish holiday. While I was in the store, I overheard a couple of people talking, and one of them was explaining how it’d had taken them two hours to upload some pictures on to Facebook.
 
Two hours!
 
Rabbi Levi Yitzchak’s words came back to me: How was that helping them?
 
OK, they got a whole bunch of ‘nice’ comments from people, but how is that helping them? Even worse, how is wasting all that time on Facebook checking out other people’s pictures helping the people who commented?
 
Life is so precious. Time is the most valuable commodity we have. In this time of unprecedented physical ease and luxury, where even the poorest of us lives like a king of previous times, we are walking around squandering our priceless treasures on things like You Tube, and ball games, and blogs and ‘entertainment’, and a bunch of other pointless rubbish.
 
How is that going to help us?
 
When we get Upstairs, and they show us that we spent a third of our life asleep, a third of it at work, and a third commenting on other people’s pictures on Facebook, how are we going to feel?
 
How are we going to feel, when they ask us why we didn’t spend more time speaking to our spouses, or connecting to our kids, or praying for all the things we so desperately need, like good marriages, health, or happiness?
 
What are we going to tell them, in that World of Truth?
 
Just imagine, how different our lives would be, how different the world would look, if we all took Rabbi Levi Yitzchak’s practice to heart, and also made every minute count by spending it in prayer and study and prayer? It boggles the mind.
 
There’s no question that the generation of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak was made of much sterner stuff than ours. Even the ‘minor’ things they went through would completely crush us, accustomed as we are to our food and our air-conditioning and our fifty pairs of shoes and nice bathrooms.
 
G-d isn’t giving us those tests, because He knows we simply couldn’t cope with them. But the test of making every minute count? That still applies; that still counts. And with G-d’s help, we can still pass it.