Letters and Lights

What happens if an essential quality, that is integral to who you are as a person, falls into disuse? Does it fade away and eventually disappear? What's if a person doesn't exercise his Jewishness? Does he at a certain point cease to be Jewish?

A story:

The sixth Rebbe of Chabad, Rabbi Joseph I. Schneersohn, would send out young men to remote villages throughout Russia and Ukraine. In each village, a few Jews lived their meager existence, struggling valiantly to keep alive a spark of Jewishness despite the peasantry that was their daily company. The young emissaries of the Rebbe, in full Chassidic regalia, with holy books and song, would come to the village and serve as a lifeline for these spiritually starving Jews. They would arrive in one village, giving out prayer books, delivering important teachings of Judaism, sharing stories and inspiration, and then they would move on to the next village.

One day, a pair of such men arrived at a village and met a Jew. The Jew looked at them in surprise. "What are you doing here? What brings you to this tiny town, where there is nothing and nobody?"

One of the young men gave an analogy. He said, "Every Jewish community has a Torah, their most holy and prized possession. But sometimes, a letter here or there gets rubbed out, and the Torah becomes unfit for use. So, there is a special group of people--traveling scribes--who travel from village to village to fix these Torah scrolls.

"Every Jew is a letter in the Torah scroll, holy and precious. But sometimes, a Jew's soul grows tired or faded. We are like those traveling scribes, traveling from village to village, fixing the 'letters'-the Jewish souls, we encounter."

When the emissaries returned to their Rebbe, they repeated to him what they had told the villager. Said the Rebbe, "Well said, but I want to clarify: The identity of a Jew can not be compared to a letter that can become erased or faded. Every Jew is indeed a letter in G-d's Torah--but a letter carved in stone, like on the two tablets of the ten commandments. Such a letter can never become erased or faded. The worst that can happen is that some dust and dirt can fall in and distort, or even conceal, the letter's true form. But underneath it all, the letter is still there, completely intact and unblemished. All one has to do is sweep away the dust and grime, and the letter, in all its beauty and perfection, comes to light."

In this week's Parshah, Behaalotecha, we read about the kindling of the Menorah in the Sanctuary. This brings to mind another metaphor for the Jewish soul--that of a candle. As it says in the verse (proverbs 20, 27) "for the soul of man is the candle of G-d." We each have that spark of holiness within us, whether we picture it as a holy letter engraved in stone or a flickering flame. We have it within us. All we have to do is reveal the light. 

On The Lighter Side...

Rabbi Himmelfarb dies and is waiting in line to enter heaven. In front of him is a fellow dressed in a loud shirt, leather jacket, jeans and sunglasses.

The guy identifies himself: "I'm Moishe Levy, taxi driver, Tel Aviv."

Gabriel consults his list, smiles and says to the taxi driver, "Okay. You proceed straight to Gan Eden. There's a deluxe suite reserved in your name."

Gabriel then looks at his list and says to the rabbi, "We have a little backlog over here. Take a number and have a seat in the waiting room. When there is a vacancy in Heaven we will let you know."

"Hold on a minute!" says Rabbi Himmelfarb. "I'm a rabbi, while that man before me was a taxi driver-why did he get instant access?"

"Up here, we only work by results," says Gabriel. "While you preached, people slept-but while he drove, people really prayed."

On The Lighter Side...

"My rabbi is so brilliant," a Jew brags to a friend, "that he can speak for an hour on any topic."

"And my rabbi is so brilliant," the friend responds, "that he can speak for two hours on no topic!"