Thursday, November 12, 2009

Wisdom of the Rabbi II





Can you please do me a favor and deliver this letter to my relative in Yerushalayim? These words are often spoken as soon as it becomes known that one is travelling to the Holy Land. Soon you will have a suitcase packed with correspondence, baked goods, tuna-fish and just about everything else imaginable.

This will bring the suitcase count to four, as one great Rosh Yeshiva of a bygone error quipped: “When you travel to Eretz Yisrael you need to bring along three suitcases. One filled with your clothing, one full of dollars and the last one full of patience”.

When I once mentioned to one of my sagacious rebbeim that I was going to send a letter to Yerushalayim via person-mail he gently chided me saying “Why don’t you do yenem a tovah and mail it!"

As the great song-writing singing rabbi quoted in the name of the Piaseczna Rebbe: “Kinderlach, taire kinderlach, my most precious children, gedenkst shon, remember, die greste sach in die velt ist, tun emetzin a tova. Children, precious children, just remember the greatest thing in the world is to do somebody else a favor. ” The Holy Hunchback

6 comments:

  1. Don't be a stick-in-the-mud. How else are we to get ecstacy and live ammo to Israel?

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  2. from your masthead:

    Blogging about ideas - not people

    from Eleanor Roosevelt:

    Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people

    http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/36354.html

    Was I mekhaven? Or were you?

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  3. It seems to me that many of the jblogs are not so careful with LH. That is why this blog will focus on ideas, not people.

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  4. precisely. Which is why, besides all the aitzos discussed in various sifrei mussar to combat LH we might want to take Ms. Roosevelts truism to heart and work our educational system to produce Great minds or, at least avoiding the production of small minds a sa means of combtting LH.

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  5. Thanks for coming by, Bray. Seems like the less you speak about people, the less is your readership.

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  6. that's because there is a dearth of great minds and a glut of small ones.

    It's the human condition.

    False humility aside...I think that back on my blog I've been able to distill discussions about ideas from the "current events" swirling around people that have scandal-mongering tingues wagging.

    Why not stop on by and leave a comment...or 12? X-D

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