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MATOT MAASEY 5785
Your Life is Bursting with Opportunity
In 1999, the founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, offered to sell their fledgling to a company called Excite—then one of the most prominent internet portals—for just $1 million. The CEO of Excite passed on the deal. Even after they lowered their asking price to $750,000, he still said no. Today, Google has a market cap of $2.3 trillion dollars (that’s 12 zeros), while Excite has faded into near-obscurity.
In 2000, Reed Hastings approached Blockbuster with an offer to buy his upstart DVD online rental business, Netflix, for $50 million. Blockbuster’s CEO laughed it off as a “very small niche business.” Today, Netflix is worth $514 billion dollars (only 10 zeros). Blockbuster? It filed for bankruptcy in 2010 and closed its last store in 2013.
And then there’s Ronald Wayne, the 3rd co-founder of Apple. He was brought in to play the “adult in the room” alongside 20-somethings Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Nervous about the financial risks, Wayne sold his 10% share back to them for just $800. Today, that stake would be worth over $345 billion!
Unfortunately, life is full of missed opportunities.
Today’s 2nd Torah portion, Maasey, contains an extensive list of the 42 places the Jewish People traveled for 40 years from Egypt to the Promised Land (Num. 33). For most of us, it reads like an ancient travel itinerary. The question is obvious: Why does the Torah record this long list of stations? Why dedicate an entire chapter in the Torah to places that—at 1st glance—seem to have no spiritual significance?
Rav Shimon Schwab explains that the moments that are mentioned were not just pit stops. These were missed opportunities—moments that could have been spiritually transformative, but were overlooked. The Torah’s purpose in reviewing these stops was to shine a light on the moments they missed—to say: “Look what could have been!” Not to shame us—but to awaken us. To remind us that our lives, too, are filled with “stations” that can either become places of growth … or chapters of regret.
My friends, what are the “stations” in our lives that we’ve passed through too quickly? We’ve all have had moments that had the potential to become major turning points, but we were too distracted, too busy, too preoccupied to notice. Moments that should have stirred our souls; moments that should have opened our eyes to see Hashem’s guiding hand in our lives; moments that could have changed everything, if only we let them.
But we were distracted. These moments came ... and went. The message was right in front of us, but we kept on walking like nothing happened. We let a potentially life-changing experiences slip quietly into the background. The Torah’s recounting of these events is meant as a wake-up call—for them, and for us. How do we open up our eyes and our hearts and not sleep through those moments?
Rachel Simon, in her extraordinary book, Riding the Bus with My Sister, tells the story of her sister Beth—a person with special needs—who spends her days riding public buses talking to the bus drivers. Wanting to better understand and connect with her sister, Rachel decided to spend several weeks riding the bus alongside her. In doing so, she got to know the drivers—each with their own story and personality. One of those drivers was Tim—who clearly loved his job and was always smiling. Curious, Rachel asked Tim what he did before he became a bus driver. He said: I used to be what you might call “searching,” except I’m not sure how much I ever let myself see. I came from a college-educated family and dreamed of becoming an archaeologist. But I got so lost in my own head that I couldn’t buckle down to a career or even school. I studied to be a photographer, but then I got married and needed more income. So I left college and became a bus driver. It’s a rewarding life.
Rachel, who in her own life, had checked every box of professional success and yet felt so unfulfilled, couldn’t understand how Tim—whose path seemed filled with dead ends, unfulfilled dreams, and detours—could be so happy, so content. Tim explained: You could say I left college behind. But I think all I really did was find another major … There is so much richness on a bus—really, so much richness everywhere—if you just develop the ability to look at life with a different eye, and appreciate the opportunities offered to you.
And that’s how Tim lives his life: seeing every moment as an opportunity—an opportunity to help another human being, an opportunity to grow and become a better, more caring and sensitive person. Tim may not have become an archaeologist or a renowned photographer, but he found something far more valuable: the hidden treasures of the everyday.
Sometimes, some of the most meaningful stations in our lives are filled with challenge. For example, how would you feel if an extended hospital stay became one of your life’s stations? I once received a letter from a woman who had always been in the best of health, when suddenly she began to suffer with cardiac issue. She was hospitalized for weeks—weeks she now considers a watershed event in her life. She wrote: When a heart goes on the blink and all cardiac activity is thrown out of whack, it makes you realize how tenuous one’s grip on life really is. The weirdest thing was that I was not afraid to die, but I had this terrible feeling of, “not yet. I’m not ready—yet. I didn’t do enough—yet.”
The feeling this woman experienced was her soul telling her that it was still far from fulfilling its mission in life. It was not ready to go back to the World of Souls from when she came when she was born—not yet. You see, even an extended stay in a hospital can be a spiritual opportunity.
Many of us are privileged to have aging parents. It’s not easy to have them live with us in our homes. Even when we have little choice but to put them in a nursing home, you visit almost every day and make sure they’re getting the best care—even when they no longer know our names. It’s arguably the most difficult mitzvah. But the love, the caring, the personal growth, the lessons it teaches our children are invaluable.
Life moves fast. We’re pulled in so many directions all at once—careers, children, community, endless to-do lists—that it’s easy to become distracted, to sleepwalk through life, to miss the beauty and growth all around us. Whether you’re riding a bus, sitting in a meeting, doing dishes, or checking in on a friend—every moment in life is an opportunity to be fully alive and fully human. Sometimes, we just need to slow down and see the opportunities right in front of our eyes.
Living a Jewish life—a life of Chesed with its love and compassion, a life of mitzvot connecting to Gd with their observance every day, and life filled with special holy days—living a Jewish life gives us such opportunities every day. The reading of the journeys of our people in today’s parsha teaches us that every stop along the way in our lives is part of our story. And we’re still writing it! Today’s parsha is not just about where our people went. It’s about who they were becoming while they were there. And so it is with us.
My friends, your life is bursting with opportunity. So let’s take to heart Rav Schwab’s warning:
· That no stop in life is too small to find meaning,
· That no failure is final,
· And that no journey is ever wasted—if we learn from it.
Amen!
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