The Advantages Of Being Wheelchair Bound

Something that has been occupying my thoughts recently....

This applies to everybody so puh-lease listen up. Whatever happens in life has at least two components. 1] What actually happened. 2] Your interpretation of what happened.

Example: A person breaks his leg. Human nature is to automatically interpret this event as being negative. But that is not necessarily the truth. Let's say a 40 year old single man breaks his leg and the nurse in the hospital who takes care of him is a single woman of 33 who falls in love with him and the "falling" is reciprocated on his part. After close to 2 decades of dating he finally found his eishes chayil on the fourth floor of Mount Sinai Hospital. Now, was the broken leg positive or negative? In retrospect he will give it a positive interpretation and tell his kids and grand kids how he met Mommy. A tear jerker. The mesader kiddushin will be the hatzala guy who took him in the ambulance to meet his "date".

That is an instance where we actually SEE the positive outcome. But here is the kicker: A basic foundation of our faith is that everything really IS good. All that we lack is our own personal positive interpretation. We ALL do that. Something goes wrong and we naturally think about how terrible it is.

The Tolna Rebbe ztz"l Rav Yochanan Twersky once had surgery on his leg and the doctors realized during the surgery that they must amputate. When he woke up the doctor asked the Rebbe's grandson [the present Rebbe Shlita] if the doctor should tell the Rebbe that he lost a leg or if he [the grandson] wants this difficult job. The doctor emphasized that most people are traumatized by this depressing news. The Rebbe Shlita said that he would do it.

He entered the hospital room. "Zeide, they had to amputate your leg".

The Rebbe ztz"l replied "Does that mean I will get a veg'eleh  [wheelchair]?"

"Yes".

"Great!!! Now I will be able to get places faster."

That is CLASSIC interpreting things in a positive light.

Or take the meraglim as a f'rinstence. Their sin was not spying out the land or reporting back what they witnessed. Their sin was in offering a negative interpretation. They said we have no chance over there in Israel. That didn't HAVE to be their conclusion. Yehoshua and Calev saw the same things the other meraglim saw but nevertheless returned with a positive report.

So it seems that our job in life is just to get busy assigning positive life-affirming, optimistic interpretations to life events.

In the words of the famous Nachum Ish Gamzu "גם זו לטובה"!!