No One Is Perfect
most often the main causes of violence in this world.
And if we cannot know it all, we can, at least, acquire some knowledge.
We can take upon ourselves to study one discipline in greater depth; we may resolve to read one or two good books every month and study a page of the Bible every day. We can spend more time helping our children or grandchildren write their school essays. Who says, we cannot recite a prayer or engage in a brief conversation with God every morning or every night?
Those who cannot read Hebrew, could set aside a grand total of an hour or two to learn the Hebrew alphabet according to the new mnemonic method I have developed. They would feel that they have been able to overcome a mental bloc that has prevented them from learning the language of the Bible for years…
The desire to acquire knowledge is one of the most noble aspirations with which the Creator has endowed us. We pray that the desire to know the truth may guide our steps at all time in the years to come. here is a lovely story which well illustrates this point.
Reb Yehudah Leib, who was a great Talmudic scholar, was often invited to lecture at some of the most prestigious yeshivot of Lithuania. After the lecture, the head of the academy, the Rosh Yeshivah, would present to him some of his finest students so that he might examine them and appreciate their knowledge. It was no secret that Reb Yehudah Leib was looking for a suitable husband for his daughter who had reached the age of marriage. Following his routine, he would ask the sudents the same difficult question, in the hope that one of them might know the answer. But so far, none had been able to answer the question.
One day, after a lecture at the prestigious Kovno Yeshivah, the Rosh Yeshivah introduced to him his finest student. He was particularly brilliant in all subjects pertaining to Bible and Talmud and Reb Yehudah took a liking to him, right away. But when he asked him the same difficult question he had asked all the other candidates, the student could not give him the right answer. So Reb Yehudah took leave of his host and the student he had examined. But as he was about to get on the coach that would take him back home, the Yeshivah student came rushing to Reb Yehudah and with almost no breath left, he asked the Rebbe:
“Revered Master, would you be kind enough to tell me what the correct answer to the question is?”
And the Rebbe smiled as he opened wide the door of his coach and said:
“Young man, come with me, I will introduce you to my daughter!”
That is indeed the sign of a truly inquisitive mind. When you have a question, you must look for the answer and consult those who know. Similarly, when you want to achieve a goal, you must be willing to work with those who can help you.
That is why, if we cannot do it all, we must, at least, do our share. We have no right to say:
“I am too set in my ways. At this stage of my life, I cannot suddenly turn around and become a completely different person.” Nor have we the right to declare: “Since I cannot change all my ways, why bother trying to do anything altogether?”
The High Holidays invite us to re-examine our way of life, correct our mistakes, overcome our shortcomings and do what tradition calls Teshuvah, a return to the right path. Our Sages suggested that we correct our errors, one at a time, because one good deed leads to another, just as one sinful action leads to another, for if we want to achieve too much, we end up achieving nothing. “Tafasta meruba, lo tafasta” “if you try to grasp too many things at a time, you may end up failing to grasp anything” said one of our masters.
Similarly, we cannot let the fact that we cannot know it all, or do it all, serve as an excuse for not trying to do our best to acquire knowledge and to do the things that we can do. We cannot use the fact of our limited knowledge as a cop-out for not learning what we can learn. And we should not let the fact that we cannot do it all, preclude our attempting to change some important matters in our life. We should be able to fulfill some of the ideals that these well-known personalities were incapable of realizing in their career.
All this, my friends, we can learn from People magazine if we only read in-between the lines of the articles and sense some of the unspoken longings of many of these famous individuals.
You should know, my friends, that the celebrities are no different from us. They are all made of the same stuff. And if some are more wealthy than you are, they also have more tsores and more problems and when they fall of grace of the large public, they do not even have a chance ro rehabilitate themselves in most cases.
(This article is based on an essay by R. Jack Riemer)
Leo Michel Abrami teaches at the Jewish Studies Institute, Phoenix, AZ. He is the author of “Evading the Nazis, the story of a