Days Made Whole: Order in Serving Hashem

1“And the life of Sarah was a hundred years and twenty years and seven years: the years of the life of Sarah.”¹ Rashi explains: “All of them were equally good.” But the holy Ohr HaChaim, the classic commentary on the Torah, writes: “‘And the life of Sarah was’: Sarah's life was spent in distress for a hundred years, for she was in distress throughout all of them. Until the age of ninety she was in anguish, like the pangs of labor, because she had not borne a child to Avraham … From ninety until close to a hundred, Yishmael was pursuing Yitzchak to kill him, as Chazal said …² That makes a hundred years. ‘And twenty years and seven years’: these are counted as ‘the years of the life of Sarah,’ for then she felt secure about her son, since Avraham had already driven out Yishmael.” [So far his words.] His words raise a difficulty: if so, how can Rashi say, “All of them were equally good”? Almost all her days were spent in distress!

2The Midrash teaches: “‘Hashem knows the days of the wholehearted, and their inheritance shall be forever.’ Just as they are whole, so their years are whole … ‘And their inheritance shall be forever’: as it says, ‘And the life of Sarah was …’ Why does the verse repeat ‘the years of the life of Sarah’ at the end? To tell you that the lives of the righteous are dear to the Holy One, blessed be He, in this world and in the World to Come.”³ But what does the Midrash's verse, “Hashem knows the days of the wholehearted,” have to do with Sarah's life here? And what new point does the Midrash teach when it goes on to say that “the lives of the righteous are dear”? Surely it goes without saying that Hashem delights in the service of the tzaddikim!

3Let us first cite another Midrash.⁴ “R' Shimon bar Yochai said: The yud that the Holy One, blessed be He, took from Sarai⁵ was flying and hovering before His Throne … Hashem said to it: ‘Until now you were in the name of a woman, and at the end of the letters. Now I am placing you in the name of a man, and at the beginning of the letters,’ as it says, ‘And Moshe called Hoshea bin Nun Yehoshua.’”⁶ Why did Hashem give the yud of Sarai to Yehoshua's name in particular?

4We can resolve this by first citing the words of my holy father and teacher, zt"l. He spoke about the saying of Chazal: “The early Chassidim spent all their days in teshuvah.”⁷ At first glance this is difficult. How could all the days of their lives be spent in teshuvah? Once they had repented one time, what more did they have to repent of? He explained it with a teaching of the Sfas Emes:⁸ the Yid HaKadosh of Peshischa, zt"l, was called Yid HaKadosh, meaning “holy Jew,” because every single day he rose from level to level in his holy service. The difference between his level one day and the next was like the difference between a gentile and a Jew. This was also the level of the early Chassidim. From day to day they walked a new path of service, and so each day they repented for not having grasped until then what they understood that day. Those are his holy words.

5To understand this well, we can say the following. As is well known, the sefarim explain the verse “And Avraham was old, coming into days,”⁹ usually understood as “advanced in days,” to mean that he completed all his days in avodas Hashem, the service of Hashem. In line with my holy father's words, it means that he kept rising from day to day in avodas Hashem. But this requires a further effort. The proper path is that besides filling one's days with mitzvos and good deeds, and not letting the time slip away in idleness, a person must also serve with order, giving a fixed portion and a set time to each and every thing. As Chazal said, “The time for prayer is separate, and the time for Torah is separate.”¹⁰

6With this I have explained a Midrash: “When Avraham Avinu was traveling through Aram Naharayim and Aram Nachor, he saw the people eating, drinking and carrying on wildly. He said, ‘May I have no portion in this land!’ But when he reached the Ladder of Tyre, he saw them busy with weeding in the season of weeding and with hoeing in the season of hoeing. He said, ‘If only my portion may be in this land!’”¹¹ What was so great about what he saw that he prayed for his portion to be in this land? The answer lies in what we said about order. When a person has order in all his affairs, it has a good effect on all his spiritual matters and on his avodas Hashem, and in this way he will reach completeness. So when Avraham Avinu saw that the people of that land kept order in their affairs, he longed and prayed that this land be given to his descendants, for “the deeds of the fathers are a sign for the children.”¹²

7So we learn from the Midrash that the foundation of a person's service is that everything “should come to its place in peace”:¹³ each thing should be in its proper setting, and a person should not live in a scattered way. That is why the Torah, in telling the virtues of the holy Avos, chose this virtue, “coming into days,” which points to order. For, as we have seen, this is a great foundation in avodas Hashem.

8This explains all our questions. It is what Rashi meant when he said that all the years of Sarah's life were equally good. Every one of Sarah our mother's years was complete in avodas Hashem, in the manner of the early Chassidim, who spent “all their days in teshuvah,” as we explained in the name of my holy father. And this was because she kept order in all her affairs, and through this her days were perfectly complete.

9This is also what the Midrash means: “Hashem knows the days of the wholehearted … Just as they are whole, so their years are whole … for their lives are dear … in this world and in the World to Come.” That is, their years were whole, meaning that their days were complete. Each year was full, with no moment in which they failed to complete the service it called for. They achieved this by arranging each thing in its own place and time, and in this way they reached completeness in their service. [For suppose even one deed were lacking: one thing not done entirely and completely in its own time, with the time of prayer mixed with the time of Torah study and the like. Then some moment would be left whose service was not completed.]

10The Midrash speaks of this same quality when it goes on to say, “The lives of the righteous are dear to the Holy One, blessed be He, in this world and in the World to Come.” This dearness is not only in Gan Eden. Even in this world, deeds done completely and in their proper time have a special grace before Hashem. That is why the Midrash connects this to the verse “And the life of Sarah was.” The verse makes clear that all her years were equally good and complete in avodas Hashem: each moment was as good as the next, and no moment had the service of another moment spilling into it. This answers the difficulty we raised from the Ohr HaChaim's words, that she in fact had many days of distress. “Equally good” does not refer to the good of this world, which is all vanity. It refers to the true good, in which all her years were equal in their completeness.

11To sum up, the way to complete one's days in avodas Hashem is to arrange everything in its place and time. It follows that the tzaddikim whose years are whole surely walked in this way, keeping the time for prayer separate from the time for Torah, and through this they completed their days.

12This lets us understand why the yud that the Holy One, blessed be He, took from Sarai was given to the name of Yehoshua in particular. Yehoshua too showed this same quality, as the Midrash says: “Why was Yehoshua worthy to fill the place of Moshe Rabbeinu? Because he served him, as it is written, ‘And his attendant Yehoshua bin Nun, a young man, did not leave the tent,’ and he would set out the benches of the beis midrash.”¹⁴ But what virtue is there in setting out the benches of the beis midrash? It would have been more fitting to say that his virtue was his knowledge of the entire Torah, or the like. We may say that his setting out the benches shows that Yehoshua brought order into all his affairs. He knew when it was time to learn, and when it was time to set out the benches and prepare for learning. He arranged the benches beforehand so that the people of the beis midrash would not have to arrange them during the time for learning. In the same way, he did everything in its proper place and time, a virtue that brings a person to completeness in avodas Hashem. Since he had this lofty middah, this trait of character, like Sarah our mother, it was fitting that the yud taken from Sarah be placed in his name.

13May Hashem help us reach this virtue too. We must always work on it, especially in the years of youth. Besides filling our days with avodas Hashem and not wasting them, we must make it the practice of our daily lives, here in the world of deeds, to give each thing its own time and place. The time for prayer is separate, and the time for Torah is separate. And through this may we bring the redemption closer. Amen.