It's been a busy week. From terror in Israel, to terror in Turkey, to the presidential primaries, to ISIS, to the European refugee crisis, to the State of the Union, to souring global markets, to powerball lotteries. Keeping tabs on all the information flowing through the myriad of news outlets is enough to make your head spin.

Yet how very familiar such a week is to us. I'd call it living in a world on the move. This week was but another unmistakable example of the ever-shifting, fast moving and unpredictable times we live in. Yesterday's bull market is today's bear. Yesterday's peace is today's conflict. Yesterday's calm is today's crisis.

Crisis isn't popular. Change is hard, and no one likes instability. Yet if you think about it, crisis and instability do come with a slight payoff. Due to the very unpopularity of crisis, getting away from it gives people a sense of purpose and mission. I don't mean to say that crisis is positive. What I do mean to say is that it inevitably pushes us to refocus and work hard to set things straight.


Take politics for example. Whoever you're supporting in the current political spectrum, chances are that their basic message and goal is some sort of "change". "If only I were given the power, I would radically alter what so and so has put in place"... Giving someone something to fix can really make them feel like they're actually accomplishing something.

But what would happen in times of perfect peace and tranquility? What would we do? If there was no poverty to fight, no ISIS to defeat, our bank accounts were full and there were no markets to stabilize? We dream of it and work towards it, but what would we do if it actually came? We live in a world on the move, but what would we do if we slowed it down?

In short, it might sound peculiar, but what seems to keep things running smoothly in our world, is the constant flow of things that don't run smoothly for us to work out.

This might seem like an over phylosophication of things, but as a matter of fact, this is the very way that Jewish thought looks at the world. In Jewish thought, history and tradition, it's always been that way. We are ordered in the Torah to work six days - only then can we rest on Shabbat. We were slaves in Egypt for 210 years, only afterwards were we able to receive the Torah and settle down in Israel. Peace and tranquility always follows hard work.

Jewish thought very much values the idea of working hard to create things and set things straight. The advantage of such a system is straightforward. When something is achieved through our hard work, we feel like it's ours.


The goal however, is ultimately to operate on a plane that is far higher than the problem-solving lives we live. Isn't it odd that it is the moments of peace and quiet that can really make us uneasy?When all our work is over, we are faced with our inner selves and can question just exactly what we are trying to achieve in life.

Living a life guided by the Torah and its commandments leaves one with a powerful, albeit hard to describe, inner peace. It leaves one secure in the knowledge that his or her job on this world is divinely ordained, and that God gives every one of us the power to reach our maximum potential.

So yes, problem solving is important, and the ability to work hard and get things done in paramount. But we should always make sure that under it all, we have a secure foundation of focus, truth, direction in life and faith, that can be the foundation for all we do.

Rabbi Avrohom