Rabbi Isser Zalman Meltzer
The head of the Etz Chaim yeshiva, the great Torah sage Rabbi Isser Zalman Meltzer, recounts a story from Midrash Rabbah in his book Even HaEzel:
One of the sages of Athens in Greece heard that the children of Jerusalem were very bright. He decided to travel to Jerusalem to see for himself whether what people were saying was true.
Having reached his destination and encountered a Jewish boy in the Jerusalem marketplace, the sage from Athens asked him: “I am holding two goat cheeses. One is made from the milk of a black goat, and the other from the milk of a white goat. Can you tell me which cheese came from which goat?”
What did the boy do? He went into a shop and brought back two chicken eggs. He said to the sage from Athens: “One of these eggs was laid by a black hen, and the other by a white hen. Please tell me which hen laid which egg. When you answer my question, I will answer yours.”
Rabbi Meltzer explains the meaning of this midrash: sages customarily spoke in hints, allowing them to establish at the very beginning of a conversation whether the person they were speaking with was wise and understood the question’s true meaning. The Greek sage therefore asked a question that sounded utterly meaningless but concealed real depth. What did he actually mean?
“You Jews consider yourselves the beloved sons of the Almighty, whom He chose from among all the nations. But if you look at the two cheeses, you will see that there is no difference between them, even though they are made from the milk of different goats. I know Jews in Greece who have severed all ties with Jewish life and live like non-Jews. Yet what do you maintain? ‘No matter what, they always remain Jews.’ I am willing to agree that if a Jew observes the laws of the Torah and studies it, this makes him better and more elevated. But how can one accept the claim that a Jew who has abandoned the path of Torah and has no connection to Jewish life will always remain a Jew? How is he ‘better’ than the non-Jews around him?”
And this is what the Jewish boy answered: “Indeed, the essence of being Jewish cannot be understood through the example of cheeses, but it can be understood through the example of eggs. Two eggs from different hens look as alike as two cheeses from different goats. But if a hen sits on the eggs and warms them with her body heat, chicks will hatch from them after a while. Then you will be able to see which hen laid which egg, because the chicks will resemble their mother hen in color.”