Parshas Terumah: Doing Things the Hard Way, Procrastinating, and Overcoming Laziness

I have a bad habit of doing things the hard way.  Rabbi Ben is constantly pointing this out to me, but this week I noticed it for myself.  While walking with a friend, she had to stop and drop some letters in a mailbox.  She had quite a large stack of letters and, after taking off the rubber band, she began cramming them a few at a time into the slot.

“My friend,” I said, after confusedly watching her struggle for a moment, “why don’t you just pull down the handle and open the shelf so you can put them all in at once?”  I realized that she was doing things the hard way, indeed, the hardest way possible.  And, as we learn from the Ba’al Shem Tov, the faults we see in others are those we see in ourselves.  I laughed because I recognized that I only noticed so strongly that she was doing things the hard way because she is just like me! Maybe that’s why we’re such good friends.

The truth is, doing things the hard way isn’t always a bad thing.  In fact, in Mesillat Yesharim (“The Path of the Just,” one of the most famous ethical writings we have, by Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto) we are warned to always be wary of choosing the easier option because it may just be our laziness rearing its ugly head.

In this week’s Torah portion, the Jewish people are told to bring everything needed to build the mishkan, the holy tabernacle in the desert.  The Jewish people rush to donate everything they can – with the notable exception of 12 of them. The 12 princes of the tribes of Israel waited until the very end to bring anything.  The Midrash teaches us that they said they would hold back and wait to see what the people brought – what the people did not donate, they would bring.

This seems laudable because they could have ended up having to donate positively silly amounts of goods if their tribes didn’t do it.  And in the end, they donated the precious stones for the ephod and the breastplate of the high priest.  These were the most expensive and most valuable, the most treasured donation that was made.  Yet in the list of donations it is listed last and we learn from the Midrash that G-d was unhappy with the princes.  Yet, as Rabbi Yehonasan Gefen points out in one of his drashas, we are left with a crucial question: Why?

The famous commentator the Ohr HaChaim points out that this indicates there was an error with the donation of the stones.  The princes did something very, very wrong in bringing them. But what on earth could it be?  Rav Chaim Shmuelevitz points to a Rashi that sheds some light.  The princes, Rashi says, lost a yud (a Hebrew letter) in their name because they were lazy.

I heard an interesting shiur by Rabbi Manis Friedman this week that explains there is a major difference between the sin Adam and Chava (Eve) committed in eating an apple and sins that we commit le shaym shemayim (“for the sake of heaven”).  Adam and Chava, according to one explanation of the sin in Gan Eden (the Garden of Eden) actually ate from the tree deliberately in order that their children would have the opportunity to do teshuva (repentance, return to the mitzvot) and thereby raise this world to a higher spiritual level.  But when we do something G-d has told us not to and we claim we are doing it because it is ultimately for G-d’s sake, we aren’t really. Why? Because we have a yetzer hara, an evil inclination, that is sitting there telling us to do something wrong.  Adam and Chava did not have a yetzer hara to tempt them. Unlike Adam and Chava, we aren’t truly doing a sin for the sake of a mitzvah.

So this is what happened with the princes.  They said they were bringing donations to the mishkan last so that they could bring along whatever the Jewish people didn’t bring.  But really they were just being lazy.  They were procrastinating.  We are told that we should have legs that run to do a mitzvah and by putting off this mitzvah, the princes were being lazy and nothing more – no matter what their excuses.

And this is an important lesson for us as well.  Sometimes we choose the easier path just because we are lazy, just as the Mesillat Yesharim states.  We drive to the store instead of walking even though it is not so far.  We prefer to swim with the current rather than against it, both literally and figuratively.  Even though we may claim we are doing it for the sake of efficiency, we are no better than the princes who made excuses for why they brought their donations to the mishkan last.  We are choosing the easy way out, we are procrastinating. We are being lazy.

But this is not to say that we must always choose the hardest way to do something, for this can also be a way of being lazy.  Perhaps taking the long way is our way of delaying avoiding at our destination.  If the princes had set out for the mishkan with their gems, it would not matter that they left first if they walked all the way around the encampment so that they arrived last.  Then taking the hardest, longest route would only have been another delay tactic: another way of being lazy.

I’m definitely guilty of this.  I will spend so long doing the “more fun” tasks that it might take me days or even weeks to reach the more difficult or challenging tasks – if I ever get around to them – even though they are what I should really be doing first.  We all do this at some point or other, I think.  We don’t even realize we’re doing it. Like the princes, we make up excuses.  And whether we’re being more obviously “lazy” by saying, “I need to take a rest so I can do my next mitzvah even better” or we’re cloaking it in excuses by saying, “I’ll go make that phone call as soon as I’m done making dinner/reading this book for work/putting these letters in the mail” it all amounts to the same thing.  Our yetzer hara is playing games with us and as a result, our laziness is what is winning.

This week, join me in resolving to do those more unpleasant or difficult – but so much more important and necessary – tasks that we’ve been putting off.  In fact, I’m off to make one of those phone calls right now!

Shabbat shalom!