How to Endure Life’s Challenges: The Power of Living One Day at a Time

When dealing with challenges or suffering, it is recommended to treat each day as a day unto itself, without looking too far ahead.

Regarding our matriarch Sarah, it says: “And the life of Sarah was a hundred years, and twenty years, and seven years” (Genesis 23:1). Rashi comments: “All of them were equally good.” But what “good” is being referred to? Her life was filled with pain and hardship: she was taken by force to the houses of Avimelech and Pharaoh who sought to marry her, and was saved only through miracles; she endured wandering, exile, and ninety years of infertility.

How can it be said that her life was all good? The righteous explain that Sarah saw only good in her life and she believed that everything was for the best. Where did she get the strength? She treated each day individually and didn’t dwell on the prolonged suffering but faced each day with realism. One day — just one — can be endured. And so she lived her entire life.

From the mitzvot given to women, we also learn to view life in segments of days, weeks, and months:

• Challah – a daily act (at least in the days before grocery stores and freezers)

• Shabbat candles – weekly.

• Family purity – monthly.

Everything follows a fixed cycle, broken into small parts, rather than a years-long view. We should view a challenge as small bundles of days or weeks. If someone says, “How will I endure this until 120 years old?”, they likely won’t. But if we look only at today, it becomes easier to gather strength and endure. Especially when we remember that even with life’s trials, there is also much goodness.

The incredible self-sacrifice of Rabbi Yaakov Yisrael Kanievsky, the Steipler Gaon, to keep Shabbat even while serving as a soldier in the Russian army, is recounted in the biography Toldot Yaakov.

One freezing Friday night, he was on guard duty. The usual practice was for the on-duty soldier to wear a thick fur coat, passed from one soldier to the next at shift change. The soldier who preceded the Steipler was a non-Jew. At the end of his shift, he removed the coat and hung it on a tree.

The cold was so intense that it posed a danger to life. However, because it is forbidden to use a tree on Shabbat (a rabbinic prohibition), the Steipler refused to take the coat.

He reasoned: “I’ll wait a few minutes until I truly feel that I’m in a life-threatening situation, and only then will I take it.” He waited several minutes, then several more, until the shift ended. He returned to his barracks, elated that he didn’t have to violate even a rabbinic prohibition.

When you face a trial without knowing how or when it will end, it may seem unbearable. But if you divide it into single days, saying, “Today, I want to persevere and succeed”, then enduring becomes far more achievable.