This past shabbos, I gave over a D’var Torah in shul and made reference to the following, which is one of the deepest teachings I have come across and a true “game changer” if taken to heart.  It is certainly longer than the typical quotes I post, but as I have said before, if it is long, I am only posting it because it is very worthwhile. 

R’ Dessler discusses the gemara in Kiddushin 39b, which states that “There is no reward for a mitzva in this world,” and the mishna in Avos which states that “One hour of satisfaction in the world to come is better than all the life of this world.”

He explains “all the life of this world” as follows:

We all know that life is a mixed blessing.  But during the course of a lifetime everyone has some measure of joy and happiness.  Let us collect these scattered hours and minutes of pleasure and enjoyment of a whole lifetime and concentrate them all into one minute.  We shall have an extremely intense experience of joy.  Now let us collect all the hours of pleasure experienced by all a person’s friends and acquaintances throughout all their lifetimes and imagine that we can concentrate them all into that same minute of that one person’s life.  The intensity of such an experience must surely be beyond description.

But let us go further and concentrate into that same minute all the happiness and joy experienced by all the people in that city throughout all their lifetimes.  And more still: let us add all the happiness of all the people in all the cities of that country, and every country; that is, all that is pleasant and delightful in the whole world during an entire generation; let us add it all up, concentrate it all into one minute and give it to one person.

…But this would still not be “all the life of this world.”  All the life of this world is arrived at only if we add together all the happiness experienced by all generations of men from the beginning of creation until the end of time.  If we were to take all this – all the good things of this world without any exception whatsoever – and give it all to one person at one time, then we should have achieved a degree of worldly happiness which is surely impossible to exceed.

And nevertheless “satisfaction in the world to come” exceeds it.  And what is meant by this “brief time of satisfaction (literally ‘cooling of the spirit’) in the world to come?  My revered father-in-law, Rabbi Nachum Velvel Sieff, use to explain that this refers to the lowest possible degree of satisfaction imaginable; something like the satisfaction derived by a poor man who passes by the kitchen of a great house where a banquet is being prepared and at least is able to enjoy the aroma of the food.  So in the world to come, a person who does not merit participation in the actual spiritual delights of that world but who is allowed, as it were, to pass by on the outside and to enjoy the “aroma” of the world to come – this is what the Mishna refers to as “satisfaction in the world to come” (that is to say, some slight satisfaction in that world, though not the delight of that world itself).  This represents the smallest reward, allocated for the smallest mitzva imaginable (for every mitzva has some reward in the world to come).  And it is this minimal satisfaction in the spiritual world which the Rabbis say cannot be equaled by all the accumulated joys and pleasures of this world from its beginning to its end!

It should now be perfectly clear why there can be “no reward for a mitzva in this world.”  The reason is simply that there is no mitzva, even the smallest, whose reward is not greater by far than all that this world can possibly contain.  The words are literally true:

There is not in [the whole of] this world [sufficient happiness, joy or reward capable of being] the reward of a mitzva [even the smallest mitzva one could possibly imagine]. ~ R’ Eliyahu Dessler in Strive For Truth