A second consolation: You are going to die. Everyone you love is going to die. Every thing and place you love is going to be rendered nothingness by the expanding nuclear fire of the sun and the ultimate dissolution of the universe itself. There is nothing you can do about any of this.

I understand that many people find this bleak. Perhaps you, gentle reader, are among them. But consider:

In this week’s parashah, Mosheh recounts a particular moment of Divine fury. Our great prophet tells us that, of the Israelites, G-d once said, הֶ֤רֶף מִמֶּ֙נִּי֙ וְאַשְׁמִידֵ֔ם וְאֶמְחֶ֣ה אֶת־שְׁמָ֔ם מִתַּ֖חַת הַשָּׁמָ֑יִם | Héref miméni və’ashmideim və’emḥeh et shəmam mitáḥat hashamáyim | “Drop away from me and I will destroy them and I will obliterate their name from under the heavens” (Dəvarim 9:14). That’s obliterate in the etymological sense: to make the letters not be.

In context, Mosheh is saying that this didn’t happen. He intervened with haSheim and annulled this threat; the Israelites lived and their names were not forgotten.

Except, you know, that they died and their names eroded out of even myth. The entire generation Mosheh supposedly saved very famously died before the book of Deuteronomy even begins, and of the ca 1,500,000 people the text tells us left Mitzráyim during the Exodus, we have barely any of their names. (Throwing in the Christian additions to bolster the numbers brings you to a little more than 3,000 named figures in the entire Bible. This works out to about two tenths of a percent of 1,500,000, a lowball figure for all those not counted in the military-centric censuses of the Exodus generation. The more you limit it to names of that generation specifically, the more the percentage becomes indistinguishable from zero.)

From this, would anyone conclude that Mosheh’s intervention was useless, that his action was no different than letting G-d’s fury run its murderous course?

The very notion is obscene. Sure, in the end these people died and their names were forgotten, but it didn’t happen that day. They got more life. Those extra years made a difference; the intervention mattered. Yes, they died anyway, but not yet, not yet.

If the only acceptable win condition is one of permanent success — the only successful environmental intervention one that guarantees a species will never go extinct or an ecosystem never degrade; the only successful anti-genocide intervention in Gaza one that permanently guarantees Palestinians’ access to material, physical, spiritual, and cultural needs; the only successful pro-trans intervention one that guarantees forever our right to our bodies and lives — then failure is inevitable. Even in the best possible case, we only have about five hundred million years before the planet becomes uninhabitable for multicellular life. That’s long for a human life, but not very long in the context of the universe. And soon or distant, it represents the same endgame: Everything we work to save will be lost; everyone we work to protect will die; even our best, most just and sustainable ordering of the world will come apart at the seams and wither away, with not even a wizened prophet to recall what we achieved. The best we can hope for is to delay this unavoidable oblivion.

But the thing is, that is a best we can practically achieve. I’ve seen more than one person scoff at the idea of little interventions, whether picking trash out of a creek or helping a single Gazan family secure a few days’ worth of food. I’ve seen people say that this is useless, futile, a hopeless prolongation of a lost cause. But in the long run every cause is lost from the get-go; the rest is just haggling over numbers, and that means every day is a victory, every season a triumph. Yes, we are going to fail, but not today. Not yet. Not yet. Every second we push failure back against the inexorable onrushing maw of obliteration is a second failure cannot claim. It’s a second that is ours, ferociously, gloriously, exultantly staked out for Life in furious spite of death. The idea that that is worthless is obscene. Every inch is worth the struggle; every moment worth the fight.

We can only delay the end of everything, but we can delay it. We don’t have the pressure of being perfect. We are free of the obligation to be eternal. The best-case scenario is not removed from us in the mythic unchanging heavens or set apart from us by an abyss of unlimited time; it is right here, in our grasp, available for us to actually do. We, here, now, can spit in the face of death and affirm: Not today! Not now! Not yet! Not yet! Not yet!

[This has been an installment of one-word Torah. You can read the full series here.]