Here is one word we can’t do without: Boker
I was pounding on the keys angrily as I composed an email to my 12th grade teacher. It was clear to me that there was a double standard. Both another student and I had handed in the same answer to a question, yet I had received a lower grade than the student whom I perceived to be the teacher’s favorite.
The teacher later admitted that it had been an honest mistake. But in the moment, all I felt was fury, and I sat down, wrote him an angry email, and hit send before I could think twice.
When we later spoke, he did not focus on what I had written. He focused on the fact that I had sent it. He told me, “Please take this rule for the rest of your life. You can never send an email or a text while you are angry. Ever. Because you will always regret it.”
That lesson has stayed with me for decades.
There is another version of this same idea, not from the side of the person who is angry, but from the side of the person trying to calm them down. Pirkei Avos teaches, “Do not appease your fellow in the time of his anger” (4:18).
When I was working on a college campus, a group of students were very upset about something. My instinct was to run toward peace immediately. But my supervisor advised me to wait until the next day. Any calm argument I made at that moment would have fallen on deaf ears. By giving people a little time to cool down, I was able to have a much more productive and rational conversation.
• • •
Moshe shows us this in the most powerful way in Parshas Korach. Korach and his band of rebels gather against Moshe and Aharon and accuse them, “Why do you raise yourselves above G-d’s assembly?” (Bamidbar 16:3). It is a deeply personal attack. They publicly challenge Moshe’s integrity and leadership before the entire nation.
If I were Moshe, I think I would have exploded. After everything he had sacrificed for this nation, after defending them time and again, even pleading, “If You do not forgive their sin, mecheini na misifrecha” (“Erase me now from Your book”) (Shemos 32:32), now they accuse him?
But Moshe does not respond that way. He simply says one word to Korach and his followers.
Boker.
“In the morning Hashem will make known who is His” (Bamidbar 16:5).
The Ohr HaChaim explains that Moshe was giving Korach and his followers the night to recognize their error and turn back on their own. He was not stalling. He was offering them a chance to reconsider before the consequences became irreversible.
The Mesillas Yesharim adds a deeper dimension to the idea of waiting until morning. He explains that night is a metaphor for confusion and distorted judgment. In the darkness, “one may mistake a pillar for a man, or a man for a pillar” (Mesillas Yesharim, Chapter 3). We see things, but not as they truly are. Morning, therefore, represents clarity. It is the moment when reality comes back into focus and we can see the world as it really is.
Moshe was not merely postponing the confrontation. He was giving Korach the opportunity to move from the darkness of anger and confusion to the clarity of truth.
• • •
We feel this in our own lives constantly. Someone posts something vile online about Israel or about the Jewish people, and our fingers itch to type an immediate, blistering response. But what does that actually accomplish when the other side is not interested in listening anyway?
Stephen Covey wrote, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In those choices lie our growth and our happiness.”
Halachah anticipated this thousands of years earlier. Chazal instituted the get mekushar, a deliberately complicated, folded and tied divorce document, specifically for Kohanim, who were known to divorce in a fit of anger and could never remarry their wives afterward (Bava Basra 160b). The purpose was to slow the Kohen down, giving him time to think through the decision and regain clarity before taking a step that could not be undone.
That is exactly what Moshe was offering Korach. Not a delay. A night. A chance for the darkness to lift and for clarity to return.
Boker.
One word. It means wait until tomorrow. Trust that the version of yourself who exists after a night’s sleep will see more clearly.
And perhaps most importantly, it means having faith that truth does not always need to be defended immediately. Sometimes all it needs is a little light.
Boker.
Rabbi Benny Berlin is spiritual leader of BACH in Long Beach www.bachlongbeach.com.
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
