Parshas Pinchas: Time Travel Teshuva
We are currently traveling in the US and Canada to see our families. It feels good to be back on the road again. It is a taste of the nomadic lifestyle we so love. But there is one kind of travel you can do without ever leaving home: time travel.
No, we have not built a time machine! (Although sometimes having such a thing really would come in handy.) Time in the physical world marches steadily forward and cannot be stopped.
But time in the spiritual realm is a different thing altogether. G-d exists outside of time. It is difficult for us to imagine, but for G-d there is no past, present, or future. They are all the same thing. That is how it is possible for G-d to know the “future” and yet we still have free will – for G-d knowing the future is the same as knowing the present or the past. This means that in the spiritual realm time does not exist in the same way it exists in the physical world. So even though time travel is impossible in the physical world, it is possible in the spiritual world!
We learn this from this week’s parsha. In it there is a strange verse that says that Korach’s children didn’t die with everyone else. And yet we read previously that Korach’s whole family was swallowed up by the earth. What happened? What does it mean? The Midrash teaches that Korach’s sons got to the entrance of Gehenom and wanted to sing praises to G-d but were unable to. When they found they could not sing, they started to think that maybe they had made a mistake in following their father. Rashi explains that these thoughts of teshuva (repentance, return) were powerful enough that a niche opened up at the entrance of Gehenom and saved them. At the very last possible moment Korach’s children felt true regret for what they had done and G-d accepted their teshuva.
You see, the Gemara teaches that teshuva is a powerful way of undergoing spiritual time travel. Doing teshuva for something has the power to either erase it (so that in the spiritual world it never happened) or even to turn it into a mitzvah!
Amazingly this means that it is not too late to do teshuva. It is easy to look at our lives and think of all the things we have done with despair. Why start to keep kosher when we have a lifetime of shrimp and pork as black marks against us? Why start to keep Shabbat when we have such a long history of breaking it? How can we ever overcome all the things we have done wrong? The answer is that teshuva can either erase or even reverse all of these things! Imagine, spiritually all that non-kosher food could become totally kosher!
But don’t wait to start doing teshuva. Some people think that if they can get “credit” for doing mitzvot simply by doing teshuva, they might as well continue doing the wrong thing now and do teshuva later, after they have had their fun. Unfortunately, we never know when our opportunity to do teshuva might expire. For we can only do teshuva while we are living and once our time is up, our opportunity to do teshuva will be no more. Korach’s children managed it at the very last second, but the others in their group did not.
Carpe diem! Seize the day! Seize your opportunity and do teshuva right away!
Enjoy your spiritual time travels!
Shabbat shalom!
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