True Greatness

Let us imagine greatness.

Yankele comes home after a wedding in Haifa. It is already late; he is tired and exhausted, and all he wants is to lay his head on the pillow. He is already reciting “Keriat Shema” before bed, but suddenly he thinks: “Wait a moment. If the L-rd is my G-d, and He is One, then I must do something for Him.” To keep from falling asleep, he fills a bucket with water, drops in pieces of ice, takes off his socks, puts his feet in the bucket—and studies until morning.

This is greatness—the kind we wish for our children. At that moment, the Almighty surely gathers His entire retinue and says: “Look at the being I have created in My world!”

Now let us look at a woman's deeds; let us call her Rachel.

It is half past nine in the morning. Her husband is at kollel, and she is at home with a toddler who is running around the house. Suddenly, she notices water on the floor. What happened? It turns out that the little rascal put the plug in the bathtub and turned on the tap. The water overflowed, and now the entire house is flooded. She picks up a mop and spends an hour and a half clearing away the water (remembering in the meantime that her back was hurting two days ago…).

Suddenly, the phone rings. It is her upstairs neighbor: “Rachel, I need to go out right away. Could you help me by watching my twins?” She agrees, and five minutes later the twins are already jumping around with her little boy on the floor, which has not completely dried.

Finally, she finishes wiping up the remaining water, glances at the clock, and realizes that it is already half past twelve and she urgently needs to make lunch. She takes her child and the twins, runs with them to the store, grabs two cans of corn off the shelf, joins the line at the checkout, pays, runs home, quickly heats up something from the freezer, and, thank G-d, some sort of lunch is ready after all.

Yaakov comes home, lifts the lid of the pot, and asks in disappointment: “Is there any proper food in this house?” She says nothing, only murmurs quietly: “I'm sorry, I didn't have time to cook…” He leaves the house and buys himself a pita with falafel. By the time he has finished eating, it is already two o'clock. “I need to sleep; try to keep them quiet,” he announces to his wife. She does everything she can to keep the merry trio from disturbing her husband's rest.

At three, he returns to kollel, and at half past three, her mother-in-law calls: “Rachel, I heard you made corn for lunch today…”

At that moment, blood rushes to her cheeks and tears well up in her eyes. She says into the phone: “Mom, just a moment…” She goes over to the tap, pours herself a glass of water, recites the blessing: “Blessed are You, L-rd our G-d, King of the Universe, by Whose word everything exists”—and drinks. The water “washes away” both the anger and the tears; everything disappears as though it had never been!

At that moment, the Almighty gathers His entire retinue and says: “Look at the being I have created in My world!”

This is the kind of greatness described as: “Praise to You is silence.” “But G-d is in His holy sanctuary; all the earth is silent before Him” (Habakkuk, 2:20). The very greatest praise is: “All the earth is silent before Him.”