Today is a very special day, an amazing day. We can all feel the excitement in the air. It’s the day the Jewish world population starts learning the Talmud again, from the very first page. After 13 cycles of completing it, today we start the 14th cycle. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s an amazing thing. It’s a great thing to take on. However, it’s a hard thing to take on.
So what we’re going to be doing here in this podcast is a daily lesson from the daf (page): something small to think about. Sometimes it’s going to be an ethical or moral topic. Sometimes it’s going to be a Jewish law, a halachic topic, but something short and practical that we can all take into our days, into our lives, and maybe even, hopefully, share with others. 11,711 pages. That’s a big thing to look at. That’s a lot of accomplishment. It’s something very scary. I think, in my humble opinion, that from the very, very start of our Talmud, the very first page, we have maybe a lesson we can learn about taking on this amazing endeavor and hopefully accomplishing it.
The Mishnah, at the very beginning, tells us about the starting time to do and fulfill the Shema—the wholeness and the oneness of the unity of God—and the end time for the evening, meaning, from how early you can read Keriat Shema (reading of the Shema) in the evening and how late can you... The end of the Mishnah tells us a story about the children of Rabban Gamliel returning from a Beit HaMishteh, from a wedding. They come home and tell their father, “Father, we have not read the Keriat Shema yet. Can we do it?” So the father says, “Well, as long as dawn has not come, you can certainly say it. You can certainly do the Shema, and it would count as the evening Shema.” All that is to teach us, as the Mishnah ends, that our sages told us: whenever you have a nighttime obligation, do it by midnight. And if not, if you missed it by then, well, really, the time is all the way till dawn.
So then what’s the point of the sages telling us, “Do it till midnight”? Well, the Mishnah says—I’ll quote the words in Hebrew and translate them. It says, “To distance a person from sinning, distance a person from faulting, putting up a safeguard, a fence, to not make a mistake.” And I think, in my personal opinion, this is a lesson in procrastination. It’s a lesson in laziness, a lesson in delaying. Human nature—and some have it more than others—is to let things go until later. Say, “I’ll do it later.” Postpone and postpone. It’s like studying for a test. It’s like handing in a paper. It’s meeting a deadline at work. It’s doing something for your house, for your spouse, for your family. It’s like, “I’m going to do it later.” Human nature is to procrastinate. It stems from laziness.
Our sages on the very, very first page of the Talmud are teaching us from the very, very first Mishnah that procrastination and laziness are not good things. We need to set up our own success. We do so by not allowing ourselves to procrastinate, by not being lazy, by not delaying. Do you know how many times a person gets up and says, “Today will be the day that I do this. Today will be the day that I give this, that I fulfill this, that I read this, that I give this”—whatever it is? No, we need to hasten opportunity and take action right away. We need not to procrastinate.
With respect to starting to learn the daily page in the Talmud, a person just has to say, “Let me do it. Let me jump in on it.” If you get into it and fulfill it, great. If you missed a day, you missed a page, it doesn’t matter. Continue. If you’re able to make it up, great. If not, just learn today’s page and keep on moving, keep on pushing. Don’t say, “You know, next tractate, next volume, or next cycle in seven and a half years from now is when I’ll jump on.” On the contrary, procrastination is one of the greatest tricks of the Yetzer Hara (evil inclination).
I’ll end by telling us a great trick to counteract procrastination, or rather to use laziness and procrastination to our advantage. Our sages teach us that whenever there’s something tempting to do, something wrong to do, you shouldn’t tell yourself, “I’m not going to do it,” because then the evil inclination, the Yetzer Hara, fights back very hard and says, “How can you not? Do it. This is a temptation. This is a lust. You have to give in to it.” So what do our sages tell us to do? Tell your evil inclination, “You know what? I’m going to do it, but I’m going to do it later.” Let me delay it. Let me postpone doing this transgression, this wrongful deed.
We can learn from laziness and procrastination that they’re things we should not use when it comes to doing the right thing. However, God gave us laziness, delaying, and procrastination to use in a beneficial way: to postpone doing something wrong. If you want to get angry at someone, if you want to say something nasty to someone, if, God forbid, you want to break something or take something or do something wrong, you know what one should tell themselves? “I’ll do it, but I’ll do it later.” May we learn from the lesson of procrastination to not do it. Let procrastination, laziness, and delaying get the better of us. Rather, we should use it as a tactic to fight our evil inclination. Have a great day.