An elderly man once approached me. His eyes were swollen, his leather face was withered with wrinkles, and his entire body was burnt by the sun’s rays. When I asked him how he had reached such a state, he explained that his face was wrinkled and dark from spending excessive time under the sun’s strong rays, with the goal of getting a good suntan. And his bloated eyes were the result of spending his nights in revelry instead of having normal nights of sleep.
I was filled with a sense of dread. What will this man say in his defense when he faces the Heavenly Tribunal? Will he have the gall to repeat what he disclosed to me, that he had squandered his days and nights in physical frivolities?
At the opposite end of the spectrum, we find the man whose eyes are swollen from lack of sleep due to plumbing the depths of Torah in the late hours of the night. Praiseworthy is the man whose face is wrinkled from exertion in Torah. Lucky is the one whose hair has whitened due to toil in our holy Torah.
How lucky we are, and how fortunate is our lot!
