After the Jewish people defeated Sichon and captured all the Amorite cities, including Cheshbon, the Torah records that Cheshbon used to belong to Moav until Sichon conquered it, regarding which the rulers used to say, “Come to Cheshbon; let it be built and established as the city of Sichon.” The Gemara (Bava Basra 78b) homiletically interprets this pasuk as teaching an important life lesson in values and priorities, explaining that it can also be read as quoting not rulers over kingdoms, but rulers over their own base instincts and evil inclinations.
What is the message of these masters of self-control? They advise us to make a reckoning of the reward for performing a mitzvah versus the loss incurred by doing so, and the potential gain from sinning relative to its downside. The Gemara concludes that these individuals promise that somebody who makes the appropriate calculation will be built in this world and well-established in the World to Come.
One Friday night during Kabbalos Shabbos, the Alter of Kelm showed his son the children who were playing games in the shul courtyard. The Alter explained to his son that virtually all people spend their time in this world playing games. The yetzer hara is very smart and very strong, and as the Mesillas Yesharim writes, one of its primary techniques is to distract a person with “games.” Unless a person follows the Gemara’s advice to weigh and calculate the effects of his actions, although he gets older and thinks that he outgrew the games of his past, in reality he remains a child his entire life and merely exchanges them for bigger, seemingly more exciting and sophisticated games.
Rav Yitzchok Zilberstein tells a story of somebody who took the Gemara’s advice quite seriously. At the age of 18, a yeshiva student in Lithuania who was wise beyond his years collected 20,000 pieces of paper and placed them in a box. Each day, he would transfer one sheet into a second box. The pieces of paper represented the approximate number of days remaining for him until the age of 70, which Dovid HaMelech writes (Tehillim 90:10) is the average lifespan of a person.
Although one box initially appeared full and the other empty, over time he was able to see their relative sizes changing ever-so-slowly. Since human nature is to be strongly impacted by what we see, this visual reminder of the ephemeral nature of our time in this world inspired him to make the reckoning advised by the Gemara. Not surprisingly, Rav Zilberstein concludes that this student grew up to become a sagacious and wise Mashgiach, who imparted to others the lessons that he had learned about our true purpose and priorities in this world. (R’ Ozer Alport)
