Opportunity Lost
Sunday, June 21, 2020
by HaRav Nachman KahanaThe Gemara (Bava Batra 74a) relates some of the travels and adventures of the great amora Rabbah Bar Bar Chama. Among them is the incident when the Rav met a Bedouin in the Sinai desert (some say it was Eliyahu HaNavi) who took him to where Korach and his followers were swallowed up in the ground. The Rav heard voices coming from the desert floor calling out, “Moshe and his Torah are true, and we are false”.
The Bedouin then revealed that every Rosh Chodesh the entrance to Gehennom appears at that precise place and Korach repeats his confession.
What can we learn from this repeated confession of Korach, the would be kohen gadol?
In two words, “opportunity lost”. Had Korach not been overcome by ego and ambition he would have maintained his elite position as one of the four Levites who carried the Holy Ark when moving from camp to camp. But he made the wrong choice and paid heavily for his intransigent stubbornness, even when facing an unattainable goal, actually sheer madness!
This coming Thursday, the 26th of Sivan my wife and I will celebrate 58 years since our aliya. Every year we visit the airport at 5:30 PM; the time when our plane landed, and we sit and reminisce over a cup of coffee and count the myriad blessings HaShem has given to two young kids who left their families and the land of their birth to embark on a future unknown, a future that turned out to be over and beyond anything we could have imagined.
We left behind family and friends. However, after time we merited to bring our parents and my brother and his family. For my father it was a return home since he was born in Tzfat in 1904, and for us every day was a new level of Torah and involvement in the ongoing progression of Jewish history. And we take extraordinary nachat when witnessing our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, all born in Medinat Yisrael, stepping forward to take their places in the amazing unbreakable chain of proud Jews and Israelis in preparing the next stage for HaShem to perform His miracles for Am Yisrael.
We left behind friends who regret not taking the step towards the opportunities of their lives; indeed, opportunity lost.