Rav Zev Leff once said that he has an issue with some methods used by some individuals involved in kiruv. In particular, he can’t stand it when people use promises to convince people to become religious.
“I’m telling you, if you keep Shabbos, you’re gonna see — by Sunday, you’ll be driving a brand new Tesla.”
His first objection was simple: the Torah doesn’t make those promises. So where are we getting them from?
But his deeper objection was the real one. That’s not why we keep Torah in the first place. We do mitzvos because they’re k’dai, they’re worth it. We have Olam Haba coming. We have a life of meaning, a kesher with Hashem, the clarity of knowing what’s true and living accordingly. It’s not about getting a this-worldly prize at the end of the day.
That’s a powerful lesson to teach our kids someday, but let’s talk about ourselves for a minute.
Basically, everything a Jewish parent does is a mitzvah.
There are the obvious ones, like davening, Shabbos, and learning. But there’s also all the other “normal, everyday” things you do: feeding them, clothing them, losing sleep over them, showing up for them when you have nothing left. All of it is mitzvah after mitzvah after mitzvah.
And some of them (most of them) are hard. Which means we have something incredible available to us to help push through those hard moments. We have a tool we don’t use nearly enough.
This is k’dai. It’s worth it. It’s going to pay off big time, guaranteed.
You’re up at 2 am with a sick kid, and you haven’t slept properly in four days. It’s k’dai.
You’re having the same argument again this week, and you don’t know what else to try. It’s k’dai. You’re running on fumes, and what this kid needs right now is a smile and a game of catch. It’s k’dai.
Let’s be selfish and think of ourselves, so to speak. Every one of those moments is going somewhere. There is the Olam Haba equivalent of an Olympic-size swimming pool and endless slurpees waiting (or, in the winter, think of something better). The accounting is being kept, and nothing is wasted.
This article was found in Nekuda Tova Issue 93.
