In his final piece on Bitachon, the Bet Halevi says, “ The Torah has stated a cardinal principle: ‘Man was born for toil.’”
The Midrash adds, “If he merits, his toil will be in Torah, if he doesn’t merit, his toil will be in mundane matters.
He explains that man was created only for strenuous effort and toil. It’s up to him to choose what toil he wants. He can toil in Torah, and then he won’t have to toil in other things, as it says in Pirkei Avot,”Whoever accepts the yoke of Torah on himself, the yoke of kingdom and mundane matters is removed from him.“ Therefore, he says that when you remove the yoke of Torah, you are only switching it for another yoke.
As it says in Berachot, “ I toil and accept reward, they toil and don’t get reward.“
The question is, Why are these the Bet Halevi‘s parting words? He wrote a whole essay on Bitachon, and he ends it off by saying that you have to toil? That Man is born to toil?
The answer, possibly, is that the Bet Halevi doesn’t want one to make the mistake of thinking, “ I will have Bitachon and rely on Hashem, and I will just relax and be lazy for the rest of my life. I’m relying on Hashem like I’m the times when they are the mann.“
That is a mistake. We have to toil. Bitachon is not an excuse to be lazy. Bitachon just takes away your need to toil on mundane matters. But we must toil.
This is an important principle. As we get closer to Shavuot, we have to understand the principle that Rashi tells us, in Parashat Behukotay, where it says ,”If you go in my statutes…“ Rashi says, “ If you toil in My Torah..”
All the blessings come from toiling in Torah. There is no escaping toil. Man was born to toil. This is an especially important principle in our day and age, where the new generation does not want to work that hard. They are looking for ways around hard work. They might think that Bitachon is just, as we quoted from Rav Wolbe, “an excuse to be lazy.“
There is no laziness in this world. People can’t avoid toil. Impossible. But the question is, what are you going to toil in? This is an important principle.
The commentaries say that the reason why the tribe of Levi did not have to toil and Mitzrayim was that they toiled in Torah. They didn’t escape toil, they just took another toil upon themselves.
The Yalkut Shemoni in Devarim ( remez 850) says, “There is nobody they got through this world without suffering. If he has a toothache, he can’t sleep. If he has pain in his eye, he can’t sleep. If he stays up late toiling in Torah, he’s not sleeping. They’re both awake, but fortunate is the man that God makes him suffer, when he’s learning Torah.”
The ideal place to put your suffering and toil is in learning Torah. A person has to suffer anyway. You can’t avoid the suffering.
Rabbi Ades once told me the story about himself: He was in his 30s at the time, and giving a Shiur at Yeshivat Kol Torah, without having an official position in the yeshiva. He would give the class on Friday mornings when there were no regular classes, and he would stay up late Thursday night preparing his class. He had to drag the benches from the local synagogue up to his house, to provide seating for the boys that came to his class.
One week, he was feeling tired and he decided cancel the class. He would get a good night sleep instead. So that Thursday night, he got into bed at an early hour, but an hour later he heard his daughter coughing violently. She was having some kind of asthma attack. He ended up having to take her to the hospital, and they got back only minutes before Shabbat. He said, “I thought that I would take it easy. I thought that I would stop learning and I would be able to relax. But Hashem showed me that I am not going to be able to avoid staying up on a Thursday night.“
This doesn’t mean that he was punished because he took off to go to sleep. That is not what he was saying. He was saying that obviously, he was supposed to stay up, for some reason, on Thursday nights, and he had always chosen to stay up Thursday nights learning. That’s a wonderful thing. But it doesn’t mean that if he decided to go to sleep and not learn, he would avoid missing out on his sleep. This might be a high-level story, but the point is that a person should never think, “Oh great! I am going to take it easy. I’ll skip my class, (and miss out on my religious toiling).” You can’t avoid it, because man was born to toil.
Have a wonderful day.