In basic English we are talking here about zeal, but
if you prefer to flash your secular education, alacrity is also a nice fit.
As Rabbi Shimon Kessin explains, a mitzvah can come
to us in one of three ways:
It’s time for a given mitzvah (i.e. hear the shofar, light Shabbos candles etc.
We could, of our own free will, think to perform a certain mitzvah (i.e. bikkur cholim etc.). Circumstance (i.e. a person could ask you for tzedakah).
Once any of these variables puts in an appearance
one must go into zerizus mode so as not to let an interval manifest itself
between one’s desire to do the mitzvah and the actual deed. The longer you drey, the greater the risk
that your intended mitzvah will be a no show when the roll is taken.
And in order to bring this message home to us, the
Ramchal sees fit to devote four chapters in the Mesillas Yesharim to zerizus
for the simple but profound reason that without it many mitzvohs simply wouldn’t
get done, period.
It is said that
Nature abhors a vacuum. To the
extent that this is correct it most certainly applies to mitzvohs as well. As was stated above, any wiggle room we leave
between our intention to do a mitzvah and its potential accomplishment lays the
groundwork for the possibility that it will either never be effectuated, or if ultimately
performed it will be in an attenuated form.
And the Satan most certainly can be counted on to
fill that vacuum.
One has to understand that from the time a mitzvah
presents itself the Satan plots to take it away from you. The longer you stall, the greater the Satan’s
chances of erasing the possibility from your do list.
We learn from the Ramchal that there are two
separate flash points of potential danger as regards the possibility of the
non-performance of a mitzvah. One is
before beginning to perform the mitzvah and after having begun its performance.
Did you ever plan to make a shiva call closer to the
end of the shiva period, as opposed to the beginning and it never happened for any number of good reasons ( your car
needed to be repaired, you had a last minute business meeting etc.)? You can extrapolate out from this to
innumerable circumstances that you have personally experienced that were
interposed between you and your good intentions to pull a mitzvah right out from
under you.
You may have been a touch lazy but the Satan wasn’t.
And if it so happens that you hit the ground
running, mitzvah wise, the Satan will pull out all the stops to see to it that
you don’t complete it because the actual completion of a mitzvah takes both it
and your reward to an entirely different level.
So much so, that it can be said that in the performance of a mitzvah the
total sum is greater than the sum of
its parts.
