Many people take a vacation to relax, to take their minds off work, and to tune out all their worries, be they small stuff at home or work, or big things like Russia’s attack on Ukraine. You just want to shut everything out. If the idea is to have quiet time and just lounge around, then why do we tell our family and friends that we are “traveling,” when we are staying in one place once we reach our destination?
The truth is, we are not the first ones to use this language. The Torah itself uses this term “traveling” as well. The last words of the book of Exodus, which is this week’s Torah portion, Pekudei, ends by telling us how the Jews “traveled.” If you think about it, it should have said that the Jews lived in forty-two locations throughout their sojourn in the desert. The fact that they had to travel from place to place was only by necessity. It was not the travel that mattered, so why the emphasis on the travel vs. on the destination?
Here we have a lesson in life.
True, we can just look at each destination, each location we arrive at, as its own independent entity and ignore the way we reached it. However, if we truly want to take advantage of every step we take in our lives to reach our destinations, we must also focus on our travels that help us get there.
Every trip that we take is significant not only when we reach a destination, but the road that we travel is also significant, full of lessons in life. This is what the Torah is teaching us: There is no downtime. We must appreciate the journey as well as the destination. Every minute of every day teaches us a lesson. We should always be traveling to the next destination, always growing, always looking to achieve something greater. Every experience that we have in life happens for a reason—here is a lesson to be learned. Whether we are on the road or settled in one place, we should always be on the “move.” Perhaps not in the physical sense, but in the spiritual sense, growing; we must grow.
That is why the Torah calls us travelers. That is why we say about ourselves, when we are going to rejuvenate ourselves, we are traveling.