Inspiration Daily
Hello everybody and welcome to Inspiration Daily. If I may, I'd like to echo the words of R' Chaim Tzvi Katz, the Rebbe of the children in the Hebrew Academy of Cleveland. When he would speak at a Bar Mitzva he would say, "I am going to use this opportunity to speak to myself. If the Bar Mitzva bachur or anyone else would like to listen, you are more than welcome".
Today I got a little piece of mussar. It came when I realized at about 6:30 pm that of my two email accounts one was not working. In fact, I checked my email and I saw that the last email I received for one of the accounts was at 6:01 in the morning. I didn't know what to do. I spent an hour on the phone with the tech guy at Verizon. He finally walked me through it, and I was finally able to breathe a little easier. All of a sudden, a flurry of emails came in from the entire day. I checked them feverishly waiting to see if anything was so urgent that it couldn't have waited. Thankfully everything turned out okay. I then wondered, what we feel like when things that we love and care for are not available for the day. If we would suddenly realize that today we didn't spend the proper amount of time with our family, with Hakadosh Baruch Hu, then we would quickly rush.
Imagine you go to work, you come back and you realize, I didn't say hello to my children today! All of a sudden, you spend so much time with them, catching every free moment. When you realize at the end of the day, Oy I didn't learn, I didn't do an act of chessed, I didn't daven mincha. The panic that would set in, I am not sure that it would be the same.
So Yechiel Spero, take a little bit of mussar to heart. Hopefully two thing. Firstly, I hope my email works tomorrow. Secondly and more importantly, I hope that this subtle message that I receive makes an impact so that tomorrow I can be a little better of a person than I was today. Have a great day and a great rest of your week.
Thursday 29 October 2015
Appreciation!
It Saved Their Lives!!
In Crown Heights, there was a Jew, Yankel, who owned a bakery. He survived the camps.
He once said, “You know why it is that I’m alive today? I was a kid, just a teenager at the time. We were on the train, in a boxcar, being taken to Auschwitz.
“Night came and it was freezing, deathly cold, in that boxcar. The Germans would leave the cars on the side of the tracks overnight, sometimes for days on end without any food, and of course, no blankets to keep us warm,” He said. “Sitting next to me was an older Jew – this beloved elderly Jew - from my hometown. I recognized, but I had never seen him like this. He was shivering from head to toe, and looked terrible. So I wrapped my arms around him and began rubbing him, to warm him up. I rubbed his arms, his legs, his face, his neck. I begged him to hang on.
All night long; I kept the man warm this way. I was tired, I was freezing cold myself, my fingers were numb, but I didn’t stop rubbing the heat on to this man’s body. Hours and hours went by this way. Finally, night passed, morning came, and the sun began to shine. There was some warmth in the cabin, and then I looked around the car to see some of the other Jews in the car. To my horror, all I could see were frozen bodies, and all I could hear was a deathly silence.
Nobody else in that cabin made it through the night - they died from the frost. Only two people survived: the old man and me… The old man survived because somebody kept him warm; I survived because I was warming somebody else…”
Let me tell you the secret of Judaism. When you warm other people’s hearts, you remain warm yourself. When you seek to support, encourage and inspire others; then you discover support, encouragement and inspiration in your own life as well. That, my friends, is “Judaism 101”.👍🏻
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