Last stop: Moshiach

Did you ever notice how our level of tolerance for traffic is directly correlated with the length of our trips? The shorter the trip is, the more the traffic will irk us.

For example: if we have to run a quick, 2-minute errand down the block, being stuck behind a garbage truck will infuriate us.

On a trip that takes an hour, traffic will still annoy us but much less.

But if we drive across the country to California, we’d almost ignore the traffic. We expect it to happen and are just fine with it.

It’s quite interesting, isn’t it?

So this week’s Parsha takes us to California! It lists the 42 journeys of the Jews in the desert, starting with the first one as they escaped Egypt, all the way to the last one arriving at “Yarden Yericho”, at the Jordan River’s bank across from Jericho.

What is the purpose of listing all the journeys? The Baal Shem Tov explains that similar to the journeys of the Jewish people, each of us travels 42 journeys in our lives (although we do not know how to define a journey).

Knowing that right now is just a small part of a bigger picture, 42-phases-journey, can greatly help us be less upset with the different bumps in life. Yes, the bumps are not going away, but we will pay less attention to them.

Here is another powerful idea: not only we will pay less attention to the bumps, but we might appreciate them because each bump is bringing us closer to our goal and our dream!

How so?

As mentioned above, the last journey was to Yarden Yericho. In Hebrew, “Reiach” means smell, and the city of Yericho (Jericho) was named due to the good smell of that town. Taking this idea further, the Rebbe finds a connection between the city of Yericho and Moshiach, since, as the Talmud describes, he’d be able to judge people merely by smelling them. So the 42 journeys also refer to our journey together as a people, to all of our ups and downs, on the way to the great promise of the coming of Moshiach.

Now, when we still traverse through the challenges, we see only the bumps. But when Moshiach comes and we will see the full picture, we’d be able to appreciate and understand how every bump was bringing us closer to our destination.

Please G-d, enough with the bumps – the individual and collective ones – may we see the coming of Moshiach very soon, amen.