Welcome to Daily Bitachon . We continue with lessons from pesukim in Ki Tavo, where it says that Hashem saw Et Amalenu / Our toil. The Ba'al Haggadah explains, Eilu habanim / This refers to the children. What does this mean? Some explain that children themselves are called toil because all of our toil is for our children. But others explain that it actually has to do with the pasuk that's being quoted: Kemo she'ne'emar , like it says, all boys born should be sent thrown into the Nile and the girls will survive . Amal means toil without an outcome. Like we say at a Siyum Masechet : Anu ameilim, v'hem ameilim . We toil, and they toil. Anu ameilim, we toil, Mekabelim schar/and get rewarded. V'hem ameilim, and they toil, v'einam mekabelim schar and don't receive reward. What does that mean? Who works without being rewarded? The Chafetz Chaim explains that in the outside world, you get paid for producing . If you go to a tailor to fix your suit, and he fixes it, you pay him. But if he says, "I tried very hard, but I couldn't fix it," then you don't pay him. We pay for accomplishing , not for toiling without accomplishment or achievement or production.That's what the definition of amal is. That's why we call learning ameilut baTorah / toil in Torah - because you don't have to produce anything. It's not about producing, it's about working hard and breaking your head to understand. And even if you never get to understand, God accepts it. That's the ultimate called ameilut baTorah . However, if you're not in the Torah or religion sector, you have to produce. If a person works his whole life, it's considered productive because he has children to leave the money to. There is l a continuation, a lineage. But if a person just toils and there are no children to bequeath that work for, that work becomes toil . Work without a purpose is toil. And because the Egyptians threw the boys into the Nile, their work now turned into amal , into just plain toil . Hashem in His mercy allows us to see the fruits of our labor, so that we can go through life not as ameilut , which is unproductive work. It's hard psychologically to live with unproductive work. We pray every day: Lema'an lo niga larik, v'lo neiled labehala / We don't want to toil for nothing and give birth to panic and confusion. The commentaries explain, and we actually say this in our Uva LeTzion prayers when we say V'chayei olam nata b'tocheinu /God gave us the Torah . Hu yiftach libeinu b'Torato . He should open our hearts in Torah so that we should have a continuation and we should not be in this world for nothing. So Hashem, in His mercy, allows us to feel like we're doing something. We go to work every day, we do our hishtadlut . Really, it should come and we should get it. But Hashem makes us feel like we're doing something. This is actually the reason why we came to this world. Why didn't Hashem just send us straight to Olam Haba ? Because there's something called nahama d'kisufa / bread of shame, if you don't work for it. But living in this world, Hashem makes us feel like we're doing something. Of course, we rely on Hashem and Hashem makes it happen, but He gives us that feeling of I'm doing something and that's important. There is a famous (unsourced) story of a man that was imprisoned in a cell, doing nothing all day, going crazy. He had no meaning or purpose in his life. The warden felt bad for him, so he installed a wheel on the wall of the cell, and told the prisoner to turn this wheel every day, because it was connected to a mill outside the prison, and so he'd be able to grind the wheat to give food to the people. The man had a new excitement in life. He was doing something! He was turning the wheel, turning the wheel, turning the wheel. After many years, when he finally got out of jail and saw that the wheel was connected to a rock and nothing else, he had a heart attack and died-Because his life was for nothing. Rav Miller applies this story to bring out a point that when we go to work every day, we're really just turning a wheel that's connected to nothing. Because Hashem is making our parnassa happen. But Hashem in His mercy (this is not Rav Miller talking, this is me using Rabbi Miller to bring this point out), makes us feel like we are doing something. And therefore, it's not just ameilut . Hashem gives us children so it's not just ameilut . But in Egypt, Hashem saw the pain of just plain amal . Children being thrown into the Nile, the psychological warfare of work without a purpose, without a future, without a legacy. So we have to appreciate that Hashem gave us the ability to toil- for purpose, And also that Hashem actually feels for somebody, as He felt for the Jewish people ,when he saw the Amal .