Parshat Shlach
Overview
At the insistence of Bnei Yisrael, and with
Insights
The Living Shepherd
“But as I live – and the glory of
Several years ago in London, there was a poetry recital competition.
The final poem to be recited was Psalm 23. A young fellow took center-stage and began, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want… He restores my soul… and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” His performance was outstanding and was greeted with thunderous applause. Neither the audience nor the judges had any doubt who was the winner, and the young fellow was called to the stage and received his prize.
After the applause and the cheers had died down, there was an elderly, Eastern European Jew standing in front of the stage and looking up through the footlights. He said, “Would the judges mind if I also said "The Lord is my Shepherd?”
Amused, the judges invited him up to the stage.
Slowly he made his way to the microphone in a spotlight in the middle of the stage. He cleared his throat and with a thick Yiddish accent began to speak.
After a few words, a reverent hush fell over the audience; soon people started to cry.
The old man finished the Psalm. There was complete silence in the auditorium.
After a few moments, the old man turned to the judges, thanked them and the audience for their indulgence and made his way out into the street.
Clutching his prize, the winner followed the old man out into the street.
“Rabbi, I want you to take the prize; you're the one who deserves it, not me.”
“Not at all,” replied the elderly Jew. “I wasn’t competing. You did a fine job and the prize is rightfully yours.”
The young man continued, “But rabbi, can you explain to me why it was that when I ended the Psalm the audience cheered, but when you finished they cried?"
The elderly Jew replied, “The difference is that I know the Shepherd.”
We can believe that there is a
“But as I live – and the glory of
Belief can remain an abstract philosophical concept; we can even keep all the mitzvos, but fail to make
When we say that
If the Chafetz Chaim walked into the room, everyone would stand in awe of him. The Master of the Universe fills the entire world and certainly the room in which the Chafetz Chaim stood, but the Chafetz Chaim gets a bigger welcome?
Because
Our job as Jews is to take the abstract and the transcendent and make
- Sources: based on Rabbi Shimshon Pincus and others