22nd day of Tevet, 5771

I quote from Rabbi Daniel Lapin's email:

In the Lord’s language, Hebrew, the word for sleep is exactly the same as the word for year.

 

 

Do not love sleep lest you become impoverished…(Proverbs 20:13)

And Adam lived one hundred and thirty years…(Genesis 5:3)

That Hebrew word also has two other meanings; ‘repeat’ and ‘change.’

Amasa was not vigilant about the sword in Yoav’s hand and he
struck him with it into his fifth rib and he spilled his innards onto the ground; he did notrepeat (the blow) and he (Amasa) died.(II Samuel 20:10)

I will not desecrate my covenant

and I will not change the utterance of my lips.(Psalms 89:35)

How strange is that?   Repeat means doing the same thing again, while change means doing something different. What message is God giving us through the way His language links these two opposite concepts along with year and sleep?
The potential trap for us is allowing each day or year to be nothing but a repetition of the one before.  Animals hibernate to cope with the wintery problems of the present and in the spring they awake to continue exactly what they were doing in the fall. They endlessly repeat past years’ activities.
We have a choice. We can be animal-like and do the same. We can view sleep as nothing more than a human version of hibernation with the focus on the biological component.   We can see a new year as simply a calendar fact. New Year’s Eve partying can serve as an attempt to camouflage the dreary passage of time and the gloomy likelihood that the coming year will repeat the mistakes of the one fading away.
Alternatively, we can see how different we are from animals and that every single day we are blessed with the ability to start anew and bring about refreshing changes that improve our lives. We can awake each morning with a smile on our faces, a prayer on our lips, and hope and happiness in our hearts as we embrace the day. Each sleep can herald new resolutions of change, growth, and improvement just as each new yearly cycle should so the same.
Each evening, we can set an agenda to make the next day somewhat better than the one before. Instead of treating the night of December 31st as another meaningless party, we can contemplate ways to change in the coming year.  Quiet thought will quickly produce a list of important changes that will make our 2011 better than 2010
We can pick from two contrasting equations.

Sleep = year = repeat
or  Sleep = year = change.

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You can get the Rabbi's weekly emails by signing up here....  Also, I've reviewed his book THOU SHALT PROSPER... which can be had on Amazon.com.  A good read...

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