Translated from Hebrew by S. NAthan

l'ilui nishmas Esther bas mordechai

      During a certain period of my youth I lived in a picturesque Swiss village. I loved standing on its ancient wooden bridge and watching the swirling water below me. Enraptured by its magical tranquility, I noticed that the water seemed perfectly still and motionless when it was clear. A mother-of-pearl shell or some sort of jewelry sunk in its depths riveted my attention. In the stillness of its depths, the difference between this inanimate object and the waters that flowed silently over it was sharply discernible. It was only on deeper examination that I had discerned the silent movement around the fixed object, though my discovery had not required deep study, because of a piece of paper that had been swept into the current. The movement of the current had become obvious through the movement of this piece of paper being swept along, or perhaps it was some other strip of debris thrown by a human being who lacked respect for the cleanliness of a river so splendid in its beauty and pristine cleanliness.

      Discerning this had been more difficult when the water had been gleaming with the purity of heaven, when no object or contamination had reflected in it. Then it required lengthy examination to discern the flowing current that donned such a gentle and attractive appearance, in its clarity and coolness on this hot summer day.

     Yet it was precisely this condition that was the most dangerous of the three. The water’s current could drag a human being down with its mighty force, should he surrender to the temptation to refresh himself. Only a seasoned and experienced eye might discern the secret danger hidden in the clear, powerfully sweeping waters.

     Man too finds himself in the sweeping current of time. It swirls and flows about him and he does not sense the powerful pull of time’s temptations and stimulations. Only when the impossible occurs, when something appears in time’s rushing current that deviates from routine, only then does man awaken and his senses tense to rouse his attention.

      As long as time does not penetrate, does not sound the siren of the personal self within him, man creates the defense mechanism known as indifference. With the help of a scale of priorities, he separates the things that are important to him from what is not relevant to him. This indifference is called routine. Routine is viewed as a blessing, in that it bestows tranquility. Routine is soothing. The fight for existence is irritating and nerve-racking. Longed-for routine is that moment of rest when a man can return to himself and reinstate the magical balance that puts him in a position of control over a threatening, peril-fraught reality.

     The danger of routine lies in the complacency that envelops man, the somnolence that masks the danger that is looming. Boredom is the bitter taste of routine.

     We may conclude then that routine holds a tempting aspect, by its sheer complacency, as well as a complacency-destroying aspect called boredom, which the human mind finds intolerable.