Oy Vey! No Way!

It was the custom of Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi to officiate as the “reader” (baal korei) of the weekly Torah reading in his synagogue. One year, the Rebbe was away from home on the Shabbat on which that the section of Ki Tavo (Deuteronomy 26-29) is read. In the Rebbe’s absence, someone else did the reading.

Ki Tavo contains the “Rebuke”, a harsh description of the calamities or “curses” (kellalot) destined to befall the Jewish people should they forsake the commandments of the Torah. That week, Rabbi Schneur Zalman’s son, DovBer, who was about twelve years old at the time, was so affected by the “curses” of the Rebuke that he developed a heart ailment. Three weeks later, when Yom Kippur came round, he was still so weak that his father was hesitant to allow him to fast.

When the young DovBer was asked, “But don’t you hear the Rebuke every year?”, he replied: “When father reads, one does not hear curses.”

Hmm… that story is really on target for what’s been going on in recent weeks. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were taken over by the government, Lehman brothers, AIG… the financial market is not doing too great to put it mildly.

Oh and China is thinking of buying out half of Morgan Stanley… and “Der spiegel” says that American capitalism has died…Welcome back Mr.’s dark and gloom…

I was on the train today and some ‘optimistic’ preacher was telling us that this is the beginning of the end, “you’re all gonna die, three people in a casket… communist China will take over the world…” ouch.

Ok 2.8 trillion dollars lost is no joke, granted. But gloom and doom is no joke either. It’s at these times that you look back and think to yourself, ‘wasn’t it just a few decades ago when our grandparents worked eighteen hours a day just to earn enough money to put a rusty loaf of bread on the table’?

It’s 2008, how many of us had only plain bread for breakfast and supper (who was able to afford lunch those days)? Aren’t we all reading/hearing/watching the news about this meltdown by such media that just a short time ago couldn’t have even been dreamt of?

I think the lesson we should learn from the above story; at least for people like us who are neither at the level of the “reader” nor of the “listener”, is to look at what’s happening with a different perspective. Same facts, same story, just with a different color lenses.

‘Think good and it will be good’, said the fifth Chabad Rebbe the Tzemach Tzedek.

Let’s take it to heart; it works in medicine (fact!) it works in psychology, it works in school… and it works in money as well.

Oh, and by the way a new year is upon us… an opportunity for a fresh new start.