Parshas Bereishis: Packing Light

Carrying my pack around for hours, I wanted it as light as possible!

Sometimes people tell me there are things they just can’t envision living without that seem very strange to me.  For instance, one friend recently told me she couldn’t imagine traveling without her urn.  She simply MUST have hot tea on Shabbos!

But, as I explained to her, it’s not always a good idea to travel with a tea urn.  When backpacking in India, for instance, you have to carry everything on your back.  Trust me when I say that a tea urn, no matter how small and light, is going to be the first thing to go from your pack!  When I first set out on my travels I did not understand this, but after shlepping my pack around for a while I started to get rid of every spare ounce I could. I was happy when my shampoo was almost out – and unhappy when I had just got more. Every ounce counts!

This is true when we’re talking spiritual baggage, too.  Think about spiritual weight: Do a mitzvah and you can carry it around forever with it never getting heavy, but do an aveira and it’ll weigh on you.  And in an even more literal sense, our physical possessions have weight but our spiritual pursuits do not.  You can pray all day and it won’t weigh anything!  So when it comes to our lifetimes’ baggage it’s best to pack as lightly as possible – filling our “bags” with mitzvot instead of the more weighty alternatives.

This is especially true when we realize that we can’t take our physical possessions into the world to come, whereas we can bring our mitzvot along.  In this week’s parsha, we see what happens when we don’t focus our efforts in the right areas.  We encounter the classic story of Cain and Able.  Both brothers brought sacrifices to G-d but He preferred Able’s offering more.  Why? Because Able gave the very best of what he had to give.  Cain, on the other hand, gave inferior goods for his offering.  He wanted to keep the best for himself, so G-d rejected his offering.

Rabbi Ben carrying his pack in India

Cain was focused on the material, on the heavy goods in this world and in this life.  It’s a bit like traveling to a foreign land and buying a castle as your souvenir – you can’t actually take it home with you when you leave! Similarly, Cain couldn’t take his material possessions into the world to come, but he lost sight of that and focused on what he could get in the moment.

As we start off this new year, let’s all focus on packing as lightly as we can.  Let’s fill our bags with mitzvot and keep in mind that one day we will be “going home,” so to only pack those things we can easily take with us.

Shabbat shalom!

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