Hidden Blessings Hidden Kindness
This week in the Parsha we read the blessings and the
punishments.
There is a custom that for the Aliya of the punishments we
do not call anyone to the Torah, so that it shouldn’t seem like this person is
absorbing all the punishments.
The story is told about Rabbi Dovber of Lubavitch,
the second Chabad Rebbe, that one year after the reading of the punishments he
took it to heart and he became very ill.
When they asked him what made you so sick now, you have been
hearing this every year?
The Rebbe responded, this year I heard the reading for the
first time, and the punishments sound so harsh that it made me sick, last year
my father did the reading and it didn’t sound like punishments!
“When a
father reads you hear no punishments, they are all blessings”.
The same words can sound like punishments or like blessings;
it just depends who says it.
Kabbala says that there is open kindness and there is hidden
kindness, and the hidden kindness is much greater than open kindness, and it is
hidden precisely because it is too strong for the beneficiaries to handle, so
it comes in hidden form.
A case in
point, ordinary rocks are available everywhere and anywhere, but precious gems
and precious metals are buried deep deep down, and one of the hardest and most
dangerous jobs is to mine those gold and diamond mines, but once you do the job
you hit the jackpot.
Another example is two people climbing a mountain on a
scorching hot day carrying heavy knapsacks, one is grouching and the other one
is dancing.
When asked
why are you so happy when the other guy is moaning? He says, how can you
compare, he is carrying rocks and I’m carrying diamonds.
When we know that the heavy load contains great reward,
nothing will bring us down.
G-d is our father and G-d is the source of all good, every
child knows that his father has only the best interest of his children in mind.
Sometimes the father does things beyond the child’s capacity
to comprehend, and the child cries and is upset, but when he grows up he looks
back and says, wow, how brilliant was my father that he used force to stop me
from running into traffic.
Talk about
the infinity of goodness, it is beyond our scope of understanding, we are
mortal and very limited in our accepting, but deep down we know that what G-d
does is the ultimate good, and we really believe it, but sometimes it is just
too difficult to bear, the goodness is just too tough to handle.
But when we remember that G-d is our father and that He is
the one who gave us this difficult challenge, it becomes easier to carry the
load, and we start marching happily, because we know that with every step we
come closer to the final rewards that await us.
We already hear from people how much they will miss the good
that came from this dreadful season of Corona; non-Jewish neighbors are begging
their Jewish neighbors not to stop the outdoor prayer services.
Others are
talking about these wonderful Zoom classes and Zoombrengens that were created
in lockdown; let’s not go back to the old routine when we have no time for each
other.
The volunteers that formed to help the lonely and the
elderly, and what about the Hatzalah volunteers who gave their lives 24/7 just
to keep millions alive.
And how can we forget the 15 million dollars raised for
Hatzalah in just 24 hours.
And the
list is long, many are already now starting to see the positive discovered during
this time, and we know that if not this virus we would never realize these
amazing qualities that we all contain within us.
When a father reads, we hear no punishments they are all
blessings.
But father in heaven, we are all finite mortals, and the blessings
are too forceful for us, please shorten the distance to the final destination,
it has been long enough.
And we
should grow up from childhood to be full-fledged adults who see the wisdom of
the father’s hidden kindness and hidden blessings to become revealed blessings
and revealed kindness.
“When a father reads you hear no punishments, they are all
blessings”.
Like father
like son, be blessed and be kind,
By: Yosef
Katzman
Posted with
authorization of Yosef Katzman to Journal Mitzvah.
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