Is Time Slipping Away From You? The Chassidic Way to Accomplish More in Life | Parshas HaChodesh

00:00 One of the greatest challenges in recent times, in this last generation—something all humanity is discussing, noticing, and talking about—is time: the value of time and how we use it. We can see that דווקא in this era, with technological developments and everything that comes with them, time—the most precious and important resource—has become the easiest thing to let slip away. Precisely because it is so easy to get things done and reach just about anywhere, people suddenly find themselves losing hours upon hours. You say to yourself, “Wait, I wanted to do something specific,” but then you got drawn into all sorts of windows, places, websites, and things you had no need for. Wasting time is one of the greatest difficulties and challenges of our era. The Rebbe taught us, and spoke about this often, that sometimes, to know what the work, the shlichus, the task of a particular period is—what we need to invest in—we can look דווקא at the challenges and difficulties that arise around it. In other words, when there is a particular shlichus, a particular task that needs to be done at a certain time, the yetzer, the force that comes to disrupt and interfere, targets דווקא what matters most at that time. And we see this with time itself. As the Rebbe spoke about in the later years—we heard it in the sichos of 5751 and 5752, the last sichos we merited to hear; may we soon merit to hear the new Torah from the mouth of Melech HaMoshiach—one of the strongest messages in those final sichos concerned time. The Rebbe said, proclaimed, and made known, in one way or another: Listen, fellow Jews, we are now living in the most precious time.

02:27 The time of the climax. The Rebbe referred to our era, our generation, as the climactic period, the climactic time. That means all of history converges on this period. The entire history of the Jewish people, from the creation of the world through the Exodus from Egypt, the Giving of the Torah, and everything that followed, leads to now: the period of the Geulah, the time of Moshiach, these final moments—what the Zohar and Chassidus call ikvesa d’Meshicha. The Gemara speaks about it too, in Sotah and Sanhedrin. This period before the days of Moshiach, this final period, is full of upheavals and tests, as we all witness, live through, and feel every day. This is the climactic time, the most precious time. It is when we prepare ourselves and prepare the world, as the whole world moves toward that long-awaited, great moment of Geulah. These last moments of galus are the most precious moments. They are extraordinary moments, and we need to know how to use them. And precisely because time is so precious and so elevated, the sitra achra—the force of darkness that tries to interfere with us in this period—brings all sorts of things that distract us and cause us to waste time. So today we’ll talk about the value of time, something important in general and especially now, as we approach the month and Parshas HaChodesh: “This month shall be for you the first of months.” We’ll talk about time—its value, how to use it, and its importance—and take the special perspective the Torah gives us, particularly Chassidus: what time should mean to us, what power it holds, and some interesting guidance rooted in Chassidus that gives us the right way to look at time

04:49 and shows how, with the right perspective, a person can use time properly. First, let’s start with something interesting. Have you noticed what the first mitzvah in the Torah is? Ask someone, “Tell me, what’s the first mitzvah?” It’s very interesting: the first mitzvah given to the Jewish people as a people concerns time. “This month shall be for you the first of months”—the mitzvah of sanctifying the new month. It’s true that the Torah contains mitzvos given earlier, but those were given to individuals. Avraham Avinu received the mitzvah of bris milah, and Yaakov Avinu received the prohibition of the sciatic nerve. But those were mitzvos given to particular people, not to the nation. Moreover, we received those mitzvos again after the Giving of the Torah. As the Rambam says, we do not perform bris milah because of Avraham, but because the Torah commanded it in Parshas Tazria, when Moshe Rabbeinu received the mitzvah of milah. The same applies to the prohibition of the sciatic nerve. What was the first mitzvah the Jewish people received as a people? “This month shall be for you the first of months”: sanctifying the new month. Rashi says so explicitly in his very first comment on the Book of Bereishis—a famous, important Rashi, one that every one of us needs to live with and review, especially in recent times. On the Torah’s opening words, “In the beginning, G-d created the heavens and the earth,” Rashi says: “Rabbi Yitzchak said: The Torah should have begun only with ‘This month shall be for you,’ since it is the first mitzvah the Jewish people were commanded.” Rashi tells us that the first mitzvah was “This month shall be for you the first of months,” and that the Torah should, in fact, have begun there. After all, the Torah is a book of mitzvos, commands, laws, and instructions for how the Jewish people should conduct themselves. Where does that begin? Here. Everything before it consists of stories—important, precious stories about the creation of the world and our forefathers. But as a book of

07:00 Torah in the sense of instruction, a Torah of commandments, it begins here, with “This month shall be for you.” In Rashi’s words, it is “the first mitzvah the Jewish people were commanded.” Rashi then explains why, nevertheless, the Torah placed all the passages from “In the beginning, G-d created” before it: “He declared the power of His deeds to His people, to give them the heritage of nations.” If the nations of the world come and tell the Jewish people, “You are robbers! You took the land of the seven nations from us,” we will tell them that the whole world belongs to Hakadosh Boruch Hu. He created it. He gave it to you as He wished, and as He wished, He took it from you and gave it to us. All the Torah’s stories from Bereishis until this point tell us how Hakadosh Boruch Hu is the master of the world, so the complaints of the nations of the world have no basis. It’s a wonderful Rashi. But meanwhile, we learn from it this interesting point: the first mitzvah we received was sanctifying the new month, a mitzvah bound up with time. And that raises a very simple question: Why is the first thing Hakadosh Boruch Hu commands the Jewish people the mitzvah of sanctifying the new month? Aren’t there more important mitzvos? “I am Hashem your G-d” was, of course, given to us in the Ten Commandments, but that came later. “Hear, O Israel, Hashem is our G-d, Hashem is One.” There are great, important, precious mitzvos. The Rambam himself, when arranging the mitzvos in his great work, the Mishneh Torah, also begins with the first mitzvah: to know that there is G-d, that there is a Creator. But when we look at the Torah, as Rashi tells us, what was the first mitzvah Moshe Rabbeinu told the Jewish people when he addressed them as a people, preparing them to receive the Torah and for the Pesach offering and all the laws of Pesach? First: “This month shall be for you the first of months; it shall be for you the first of the months of the year.” And the Rambam

09:00 He says that from this verse we learn the mitzvah of sanctifying the months and years: making the calculations and knowing when they begin. As we know, when the Beis Hamikdash stood, in the time of the Sanhedrin, the sages of the Sanhedrin had to know all the laws of astronomy—the movements of the stars and constellations and the calculation of time—in order to determine when Rosh Chodesh would be, when the festivals would be, and when all the appointed times of the year would fall. And it all begins with sanctifying the months and years. What is the meaning of this? Here we see something wonderful: the first thing the Torah tells a Jew is to know how to sanctify time. To recognize that time is the first gift Hakadosh Boruch Hu gave you, and with that time you can then do everything else—Torah and mitzvos. There are 613 mitzvos, 613 mitzvos, including taking things from this world and using them to perform a mitzvah. Hakadosh Boruch Hu gave us a world full of objects and other things, and a Jew has a mitzvah connected with every kind of thing and every place. There are mitzvos connected with tefillin and tzitzis, Shabbos and festivals, matzah and shofar. There are mitzvos connected with the inanimate, with plants, with animals and with people. There are many mitzvos, but the first point is to sanctify time, to value it, to bring holiness into it. Time is the first thing that exists. Once you have time, a person asks, “What do I do with this time?” And then the Torah tells you what to do with it. There is a time for Shabbos, a time for a festival. There is a time for an ordinary day, when there are also mitzvos to perform at that particular time and moment. But first comes the very existence of time. And this is the wonderful thing we see in the passage about the new month. The Jewish people are only now beginning to become a nation. They had been in Egypt, subjected to backbreaking labor, and they were

11:15 under all the bondage imposed on them. The moment the Jewish people are freed and rise up to become a nation, what is the first thing Hakadosh Boruch Hu tells Moshe Rabbeinu to teach them? The value of time. The importance of time. The holiness of time. You have time? Value it. Sanctify it. A Jew needs to take stock and know what he is doing with his time. You have time—value it, and then turn it into holy time. More than that: according to halachah, all the calculations we make—calculating when Rosh Chodesh is, when Pesach is, when Shavuos is—transform the whole reality of time. As we see in the Rambam’s Laws of the Sanctification of the New Month, the Rambam explains all the calculations of the movements of the moon, the sun and the stars, so that we can understand how time is calculated. Then the whole reality of time becomes a means by which we know when to observe the holy days and festivals. This shows us a Jew’s power to make time holy. Time is the essential resource, the first thing Hakadosh Boruch Hu created. As is well known, the Maggid of Mezritch said that the first creation was time. Time is something Hakadosh Boruch Hu created during the Six Days of Creation. Time was created first. Once time was created, space and physical expanse were created along with it, and together they make up the whole reality of creation. So in serving Hashem, too, a Jew needs to take time and make it something precious. The question now is how we can give time its proper value and importance. One of the wonderful things Chassidus teaches us concerns something we often struggle with: time getting away from us. As we said, time is the most precious resource, but it is also the easiest thing to lose.

13:33 There is a well-known saying, already quoted by great Jewish sages many generations ago: “A person worries about losing his money, but does not worry about losing his days.” In other words, it is human nature to worry when money is lost, or when health is lost, G-d forbid. But with time, we don’t quite feel the loss in the same way, because it just slips through our fingers, right? This is what the works of mussar spoke about: a person worries about losing his money. Money comes and goes. You lost some? Tomorrow you may earn it back; you can do it again. But time is a loss that cannot be recovered. You have it now, but afterward you won’t. One of the things Chassidus teaches us is a healthy, accurate way of looking at time. It teaches us several very important things about how to use time, how to value it, and how not to get stuck in the problems time can bring us. What do I mean by getting stuck in the problems of time? Something we encounter very often in life is a person getting stuck in his past. He is stuck there—he does not move forward, he is not active—because he carries all sorts of trauma, baggage, difficulties and problems from the past. He keeps digging into his past, and meanwhile his time is being wasted. Sometimes the opposite happens, too. We try to build what we call plans for the future, but then all sorts of those plans dissolve, and once again our time—the present—slips away as well. Here, too, there is the famous saying attributed to great Jewish sages: “The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and the present is like the blink of an eye.” In other words, why invest so much in the past, which is already behind us, or in the future, which has not yet arrived? Make use of the present.

15:49 And this is one of the more interesting points the Alter Rebbe discusses in Tanya. He cites the Baal Shem Tov. The Baal Shem Tov taught us one of the most precious and important secrets concerning the creation of the world—the great teaching of the Baal Shem Tov that the Alter Rebbe brings in Tanya, in Shaar Hayichud Vehaemunah. The Alter Rebbe says in the name of the Baal Shem Tov: “Forever, Hashem, Your word stands firm in the heavens.” Hakadosh Boruch Hu created the world through speech. “And G-d said, ‘Let there be a firmament.’” “And G-d said, ‘Let there be light,’” and “Let the earth sprout vegetation.” The entire world was created during the Six Days of Creation through ten utterances. The verse tells us: “Forever, Hashem, Your word stands firm in the heavens.” That speech through which Hakadosh Boruch Hu created the world—Hashem spoke, and it came to be; He commanded, and they were created. Hakadosh Boruch Hu created the world through nothing other than speech. He said, “Let there be a firmament,” and there was a firmament. He said, “Let there be a fruit tree,” and there was a fruit tree; and so it was with all of creation. The Baal Shem Tov says that this creation is renewed at every single moment. “In His goodness, He continually renews the work of creation every day.” The Baal Shem Tov says to understand these words in their simplest, truest sense. Hakadosh Boruch Hu renews creation every day, continually. “Continually” means not only every day, but at every moment. Every single moment is a new reality, a new creation from nothing. Hakadosh Boruch Hu renews creation from absolute nothingness and creates the world at this very moment. Right now, Hakadosh Boruch Hu says, “Let there be a firmament.” There is an explanation for what happens at this moment. It is not simply a law; there is a reason for it. The Alter Rebbe goes into this at length in the chapters of Shaar Hayichud Vehaemunah. Why? Because the world is a reality newly created from nothing, therefore

17:48 It has to be renewed every single moment. Only Hakadosh Boruch Hu has the power to create something like that, something from nothing. The moment the Divine power is no longer present in a created being, that being no longer exists. It becomes nothing at all, because it has no ability to exist on its own—only the Divine power that brings it into being anew every single moment. When we reflect on this idea of renewal, on the renewal of creation at every moment, it gives us a new perspective on the whole concept of time: how precious time is, and how important it is to focus on the present. When we understand that right now the world, all of creation, is truly being brought into being anew by Hakadosh Boruch Hu, then the moment you internalize that, you invest yourself in this moment. You invest in the present. You understand deeply that there is no point in wasting time on the past. Of course, sometimes a person needs to think about the past; sometimes you need to make an accounting of your soul. As great early Torah sages wrote, the past is a teacher for the future. In other words, sometimes a person needs to look at past events to learn from past mistakes—or, conversely, to learn from the good things in the past how to strengthen the future. Yes. But being stuck in the past, staying there, unable to break free and constantly digging into it—that is a waste of time. At this moment, Hakadosh Boruch Hu created you from nothing. Start living anew. There is no past; there is a present. The present is a renewed, new, fresh reality. So right now, at this moment, what does Hakadosh Boruch Hu want from me? It doesn’t matter if a moment ago, an hour ago, or a day ago I did something I shouldn’t have, perhaps I didn’t behave well, things happened and I wasted time and... But forget it; don’t keep digging into it. Now you have a new moment in time. Make use of

20:05 this present moment as fully and as preciously as you can. And the same applies to the future. Of course a person needs to make plans, so they can do things properly and in a healthy way. But that’s it. When a person is sometimes wholly absorbed in the future and wastes the present because of it, that is the same story. We need to know that the focus, the main thing, is to value the present, to value this moment. Once I understand that right now Hakadosh Boruch Hu is bringing me into being, and therefore there is a purpose to this moment, I devote myself completely to making the most wonderful use of it. One of the things that happens to us is that we’re constantly living in different places and times—the past, the present, and the future. We get confused, and then we don’t make good use of the present. Our minds fly off in every direction, toward the past and the future, and the present moment slips away. There was once an incident at a farbrengen with the Rebbe that gives us such a wonderful view of Chassidus’s approach to time. In 5735, there was a farbrengen. The Rebbe was farbrenging, and it was a very special farbrengen, because a large group of chassidim had come and were due to return home. Many chassidim had come from Israel and from Europe. It was a very special occasion. On the day they were due to return, just before their flight, before the journey back, the Rebbe wanted to hold a farbrengen—a kind of farewell farbrengen, “Go in peace,” as the Rebbe called it. So the Rebbe came down to farbreng, delivered a maamar of Chassidus, and gave a sicha, then another sicha. The crowd began looking at their watches and realized they were running late. They had to get to the airport. The plane wasn’t going to wait for them, but the Rebbe seemed to have all the time in the world. People started getting anxious, looking at

22:17 their watches, while the Rebbe continued, speaking sicha after sicha. Of course, the Rebbe noticed the atmosphere. He saw that the crowd was, as they say, on edge. So the Rebbe began to tell a story. “Something happened to me when I was with my father-in-law, the previous Rebbe,” he said. He related that the Frierdiker Rebbe had needed to travel from one country to another. I don’t know whether it was from Russia to Poland or from Riga to Poland. It was a move he had to make then—a very important, complicated, difficult journey that required a great deal of concentration. At home there was tremendous commotion: packages, suitcases, travel preparations, and it was time to set out. Everyone knows what it means to set out on a journey, especially when this wasn’t a trip of a few days. It was a move from one country to another during the difficult years of the Communists. The Rebbe related: “I came into the house. There was enormous commotion; everything was in an uproar, people were moving about. I wanted to see what my father-in-law, the Frierdiker Rebbe, was doing. I entered the Frierdiker Rebbe’s room and saw him sitting there, his thoughts somewhere else entirely, completely focused, writing an exceedingly deep maamar of Chassidus. He was in the middle of writing about a very profound subject in Chassidus.” The Rebbe said, “How could I have imagined that fifteen or twenty minutes before a journey, someone could sit like that, fully concentrated, and work on such a thing?” I expressed my amazement, the Rebbe said. The Rebbe was so struck by that kind of concentration at a moment like that, and I asked, “How do you do it?” The Frierdiker Rebbe explained to him: “There is such a thing as being successful with time. I’ll explain to you what it means to succeed with time.” The Rebbe spoke about the Rashba, one of the great early Torah sages. Everyone knows

24:43 the Rashba, Rabbi Shlomo ben Aderes, one of the sages of Barcelona, of Spain, eight hundred years ago. It is told about him that his days were full and holy. He was, in effect, the rabbi of the entire Jewish world and guided all of Spanish Jewry. He was a rabbi in Barcelona and also headed a yeshiva. Every day he gave several classes to students and answered all kinds of questions, both from his own city and from other countries. There is a collection of the Rashba’s responsa, in addition to the Torah insights he wrote. He was also a doctor, and all sorts of people came to him seeking remedies of various kinds. On top of all that, he still had time to go for a walk every day—for a little physical health. He would go out walking for about an hour each day. When he was asked how he could do all that, where he found the time, he said, “That is what it means to be successful with time.” What does being successful with time really mean? The explanation is that when a person starts doing something, ordinarily it takes people a long time to get into it. A lot of time is lost before they settle in. And once they do, they know they have something else to do later, so their minds are no longer focused because they’re planning the next thing. The result is that something they could have done in half an hour takes them an hour or an hour and a half. With the time lost over the previous thing and the next thing, you end up not being present even in the present. So the secret to succeeding with time is that when you’re doing something, nothing else exists. Right now, only this exists. When you’re engaged in a particular task, you work

26:42 On this—this is the only thing that exists in my life. The things I did before no longer exist; they’re gone. What I’m supposed to do afterward doesn’t exist yet. Right now, only the thing I need to do right now exists, and then I can be completely absorbed in it. The moment I finish, I close it; it’s done. I close it and begin something else. That way, even the time in between, the transition from one thing to another, isn’t wasted. The Rebbe asks: “How can we achieve such a thing?” You hear this and say, wow, that’s a very high level. One of the simplest ways to achieve it is to reflect on what the Baal Shem Tov taught us. A Jew who learns Chassidus and learns Shaar Hayichud Vehaemunah, which explains that at every moment Hakadosh Boruch Hu creates the world anew from nothing, just as He did the first time, lives in the present. At this moment, only this moment exists—not the previous moment and not the next one. So you can focus entirely on what is here now. What is supposed to come next doesn’t worry you. When it needs to happen, Hakadosh Boruch Hu will make it happen at the right moment, at the right time and in the right place. So the Rebbe turned to the chassidim and said: “Right now we’re at a chassidic farbrengen. There’s no plane, no airport, no journey. There’s a chassidic farbrengen. We’re speaking Chassidus, speaking words of Torah, speaking about what we’re discussing here, and we’re entirely here. When we finish the farbrengen, we’ll set out, we’ll arrive, and Hakadosh Boruch Hu will make everything happen at exactly the moment it needs to. Then He’ll create the airport and the plane anew.” Of course, that last part was said with a touch of irony. But the point, the powerful message the Rebbe teaches us here, is that when a Jew lives with the power—

28:42 of renewal, with the understanding that Hakadosh Boruch Hu renews the world at every moment, it gives you the ability to live each moment in the most inward, profound and focused way, and truly make the best use of your time. And perhaps this explains why this Shabbos is called Parshas Hachodesh. The mitzvah through which we learn about the sanctity of time is the sanctification of the new month, the sanctification of time: Parshas Hachodesh, “This month shall be for you.” Chodesh, “month,” is related to chiddush, “renewal.” When a person knows that Hakadosh Boruch Hu renews time at every moment, it gives him the ability to make use of time and value it, so that every moment is filled with meaning—with genuine, living, wholesome meaning, as it should be. And as we said earlier, we’ll conclude with this: If time is always precious and important, how much more so in our generation, in our era, at this time. The Rebbe told us that we are at the end of the time of galus, in the most extraordinary moments before Moshiach’s coming. As the Alter Rebbe says in Tanya, chapter 37, the deeds and the work a Jew does during galus, in these moments, are especially precious, because all the wonderful things we know we will receive when Moshiach comes depend on our work in these moments. So let us use this time, knowing that we are at its peak, at its most precious point. May we be wise enough to use our time in the most important and valuable way, so that our time will truly be precious. Especially as we enter the month of Nissan, such a wonderful month, the month of Geulah. As the Gemara says in tractate Rosh Hashanah, “In Nissan they were redeemed, and in Nissan they are destined to be redeemed.” We are all waiting and hoping that this year we will truly see with our own eyes the fulfillment of the prophecy of—

30:52 Geulah, the complete Geulah through our righteous Moshiach. So let’s use this time, these last moments, making every single moment precious by doing another mitzvah, learning another verse of Torah, finding another Jew, helping him put on tefillin and bringing him closer to Torah and mitzvos. Let’s bring the light of Torah to another place and another part of life. Let’s make our time a time of holiness, a precious time. Then, very soon in our days, may we see the true time we are all waiting for: the time of Geulah, the true and complete Geulah. May each and every one of us have a month of Geulah, a month of joy, a month in which “in Nissan they were redeemed, and in Nissan they are destined to be redeemed.” Amen.