A Question Of Focus

There is a very well known story that I am retelling in order that it should serve as a paradigm for life.

After the end of World War II, the brilliant Torah sage, Rabbi Eliezer Silver visited and aided thousands of survivors in displaced persons camps in Germany and Poland who were waiting to find permanent homes. One day, as he was handing out Siddurim (prayerbooks) and other Torah paraphernalia, a Jewish man flatly refused to accept any.

"After the way I saw Jews act in the camp, I don't want to have any connection with religion!"

Rabbi Silver asked him to explain what exactly had turned him off from Jewish practice.

"I saw a Jew who had a Siddur, yet he only allowed it to be used by the inmates in exchange for their daily bread ration. Imagine," he sneered, "a Jew selling the right to daven for bread!"

"And how many customers did this man get?" inquired Rabbi Silver.

"Far too many!" snapped the man.

Rabbi Silver put his hand around the gentlemen and gently explained. "Why are you looking at the bad Jew who sold the right to pray? Why don't you look at the many good Jews who were willing to forego their rations and starve, just in order to pray? Isn't that the lesson you should take with you?"

In life we can choose to read the papers and find out about all of the terrible things that are going on. We will see a world of evil, crime and everything horrible. Everything - until tomorrows paper is read and yet more evil is digested.

Or we can choose to focus on what is good. All of the chesed, kedushah, holy special people, counselors at HASC or Camp Simcha, people who volunteer at group homes, people who live pure idealistic lives divorced from all of the materialistic pleasures with which we are swamped. People who devote their lives to educating childrern with pure love, people who treat their wives and children with the utmost respect, people who are devoted to spreading goodness and light. There is no dearth of such people. People like the Fogels or the 8 kdoshim who were killed in mercaz harav.

Or focus on the child abusers, the wife beaters, the drug addicts, the hypocrites and the charlatans.

Or focus on all of the people who searched for Leiby Kletzky or who davened and did mitzvos for the merit of Meira Reimer, both of blessed memory.

We can look at our spouses and parents and focus on all of their faults. They have many - if they are human. Or we can try to look at all of the good they do and know that within each and every human being reposes a G-dly soul.

I suggest quite strongly that we choose to focus on the positive. That will make us better people and improve the world. Focusing on the negative creates angry cynics who [often anonymously] are so ubiquitous on this internet.

If one can do something to improve this world then by all means! But just to be critical and angry
helps nobody - and actually harms those around such a person.

REMEMBER! The greatest victim of cynicism - is the cynic.

Or to take a line that I heard in the name of Rebbe Nachman: כל הכועס - על עצמו הוא כועס. Anyone who is angry, is really angry at himself.

Deep.

And true.

Much love sweetest friends!:-)

PS - Please pass on. This is a message everybody needs to hear...