My driving mashal of the month:
I went today on my first trip to a faraway place (stop laughing, Rachel ;) ) all by my lonesome. A fifteen minute drive on roads previously uncharted (at least by me..). The way there was fine. On the way back, made a wrong turn. Simple mistake, right? Um...it takes talent. Anyway, I called a wonderful friend who knows everything about every direction there is to go, and she told me to go in a certain direction. As I was speaking to her, I saw a road that looked familiar-so I said "never mind, I just found it...I'm going this way." She didn't sound so sure, and said, "um..ok, but I don't think that'll go where you need to go.."
Well...aside from the fact that it WAS another wrong turn, the route I had planned to take didn't work even when I found the right road! So I called her back, sheepishly, and asked her for directions, promising to follow them to the letter. When I listened to her, I got where I needed to go-in the 15 minutes it was supposed to take originally.
The nimshal?
I wasted 45 minutes of my time because I was stubborn and didn't want to listen to the person who could help me (yes, you can gloat..). You can take that for Emunas Chachamim, Emunas HaTorah, Kibud Av Va'Em, whatever you'd like. Just know that when you quiet your ego for a bit, you'll find that many people have important things to tell you!!
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4 comments:
You drove in your point very well.
Aishel--very punny.
TRW--Awww poor dearie...Honestly though, good point. My roomy from sem recently asked (indirectly) a shayla about lighting Chanukah candles in her room. It's a long story, but suffice it to say that the answer was one that I would never have thought of had it not been paskined. But I was so impressed that she asked and didn't just "take a stab" at an answer as I'm sure many did...
And often it really does save us "time and energy," not just in the next world but in this one as well. I've been driving my TA crazy about keeping the automatically-locked door open when he's helping me with my project (the door has an automatic silent alarm that goes off after a while--oops!), but Rabbi Heber said that because of a bunch of reasons specific to my case, there was no problem of yichud at all. Why on earth grope in the dark when you can turn on a flashlight and know exactly where to go?
Thanks for the mashal, dearie!
Reminds me of something I once heard.
Airplanes have two altimeters (instrument which shows changes in altitude). Why? Because sometimes pilots suffer from vertigo or something similar, where their perception of ground and sky becomes confused. A pilot suffering from this condition could look at his altimeter and say - oh, it must be broken, because I see outside that my position is really such and such. So there are two altimeters. That way the pilot looks at both and knows that they can't both be broken, and it's gotta be that he's mistaken. And the person who told me this heard it from a former pilot, who said that this actually once happened to him, and it took every bit of self control to follow the instruments, even though it seemed to him that by doing that, he'd crash into the ground.
The nimshal is obvious :)
Wow, nice mashal defen. Where's YOUR blog? ;)
And since everyone's adding meshalim, here's one that's been on my away msg for a while:
If something about Yiddishkeit bothers you, what does it mean?
A milkman once came to the shtetl rav in Elul, and said:
"All year long I've been selling watered-down milk to my customers. But now it's almost Yom Kippur and I want to do tshuva. What can I do?"
The rav answered: "Well, the first step of tshuva is abstaining from doing the chait. So the first thing you have to do is start selling real milk instead. Do that for a week, and then come back to me."
A week later, the man walks into the rav's house, fuming. "You destroyed my business!" he shouted at the rav.
"How? Did you do as I said?"
"I sure did! I've been selling pure milk. But all of my customers stopped buying from me! They tell me that my milk 'tastes funny'!"
When you're so used to sheker, even emes "tastes funny"...
(Rabbi Zev Leff's tape on Yom Kippur and Vidui).
May you have a finding-emes-dikeh Chanukah! (Echoes of the E's...huh?...)
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