Parshas Tzav- When The Going Gets Tough

As I was reading through the parsha, Parshas Tzav, I noticed a very interesting halacha about the korbanos. There had to be a fire going perpetually, never to be covered or put out. In Passuk Hay it says that the fire must never go out, and it again reiterates that in the next passuk, mentioned above, showing us just how important that command is. Something about this passuk really struck me, and I think it relates to our current situation very well.

On Shabbos we sing the zemer of Bilvavi Mishkan Evneh. In that zemirah, we say the words:

The Ohr HaChaim HaKadosh points out that the passuk says "I will dwell amongst them," not, "I will dwell in it", as you would expect. He says that is because HaShem is promising to rest amongst Klal Yisrael, and so the passuk uses the word בְּתוֹכָֽם.

Combining that with the zemirah, we now understand that we each house a Mishkan where HaShem rests, where we can connect to Him, and inside that Mishkan we have a Mizbeach, and we have on that Mizbeach the אֵ֗שׁ תָּמִ֛יד, which we now know is not allowed to be covered or extinguished.

The question is, when we are in trying times like this, how can we ensure that our flame, our fire that we use to serve HaShem, doesn't go out?

This is a question I was struggling with. Due to the current situation, I felt spiritually de-energized. Especially coming from a Torah high in Eretz Yisrael, I was feeling a spiritual lack of epic proportions. Constantly hearing bad news, constantly adding names to my Tehillim list is draining, and I had no energy to serve HaShem the way I had been. My fire, so to speak, had almost gone out.

I spoke to a couple of my teachers about it, and they gave me some practical advice that I think fits with this idea. They told me that even if I couldn't have intense kavanah, to keep the routine. Keep davening even if I couldn't have emotion in it, and then to find one area, one small thing I could add where I would try to have kavanah there. Find one area that I could work on and anchor to this situation. They told me to find one bracha in davening that whenever I would say it I would think of this matzav, and remember Corona 2020.

We can't always feel everything we want. It's very easy to say, "Why am I feeling so disconnected? If anything I should be super connected now!" but we need to remember that we have ups and downs. R' Wolbe talks about ימי אהבה, days where we're on fire and feel connected, and ימי שנאה, days where we feel burnt out and totally disconnected. We go through both, and the important thing is to just keep to our spiritual routine in order to feel connected again.

Like the Netziv says, even when there are no korbanos on the Mizbeach the fire still needs to be there! Even when we have no "korbanos" to give, and we can't give HaShem the davening we wish we could, or do the mitzvos with the proper simcha, the fire has to keep going. It might be a small flame- it might just be the basics, but we need to keep the structure, keep pushing ourselves to daven and do mitzvos and serve HaShem- without beating ourselves up that we don't have the kavanah that perhaps we wish we had, or that we can't do the mitzvos to the level we wish we could.

I think that this is a very powerful message for those of us who feel burnt out right now. We're in a rough situation, and it's inevitable that everyone will go through ימי שנאה. We just need to remember that the fire cannot go out. We need to keep up the basic structure even if we can't offer up an emotionally charged korban. By working through the ימי שנאה and growing from it, and keeping at it and working as much as we can, we can eventually get back to the ימי אהבה even stronger than before.

l'ilui nishmas: Moshe ben Menachem and Pesach Yehoshua ben Yosef Meir.

zechus refuah: Yosef Dovid ben Yittah Miriam