because everybody's doing it....

for when I wonder why I do this

Once, there were four rabbonim who were awakened by an angel who carried them off to the Seventh Vault of the Seventh Heaven, where they were able to see the sacred wheel of Ezekiel. Now somewhere in the descent from paradise to earth, the first rabbi, from having seen such splendor, lost his mind and went frothing and foaming through the desert for the rest of his days.

The second rabbi was very cynical about the experience. He said, "Well, I only dreamed that I saw Ezekiel's wheel. Nothing really happened. I imagined it all."

The third rabbi gave sermon after sermon on the intricacies of Ezekiel's wheel. He analyzed how it was built and what it all meant. He was obsessed with the wheel, and in this way, he betrayed his faith.

The fourth rabbi was a poet. He was inspired by the wheel. He took paper and reed, and sat by the window, and wrote song after song in praise of the evening dove, his daughter in her cradle, all the stars in the sky. And he lived his life better than before.

***

There are those who know what is going on in the world--for instance, the rebbe. What a wonderful symbol! A person who knows the meaning of things--even the things you can't grasp. There is a famous story about a hunchback who, because he was a great rabbinic scholar in a Hasidic family, was hooked up to be married to a beautiful woman. But when she took one look at him she was so shocked by his deformity that she refused to marry him. When he heard the news, he told the families, "I'll be happy to cancel the marriage even though we've arranged it, but I just want five minutes to talk with her." So they gave the couple five minutes alone.

When the two of them came out of the room, the families were astonished: Suddenly she's happy to marry him, delighted. So a student said to him, "Rebbe, what did you say in five minutes that turned her around?"

He said, "Very simple, I made her see the moment at which, forty days before we were both conceived, there was a heavenly announcement that said, 'this man is to marry that woman.' And at the same time there was an equally powerful announcement that said, 'but one of them is to be a hunchback.' And she saw my soul say, 'Oh, my God, of one of us is to be a hunchback, I can't let it be her. Let it be me.' So I was the hunchback. And when she saw the way it happened, she said she would marry me."

Now if you have the power to tell a story like that, you have a way of healing things. Having a hunchback is a wound! But in that story, it's not a wound; all of a sudden it's healed, through a story. Through that tale, love actually triumphs over the disfigurations, the wounds, and the scars of life.

How many scars do you have from protecting and caring for other people? If you raise children, you have lots of them. Raising kids is a series of alternations between the agony and the ecstasy, and you know what the agony is like. There are scars and they hurt. Loving another human being is the same way, and committing yourself to a cause is the same way: it leaves real scars. But the scars take on a very different view if the story tells you that they're an expression of love, if the story is that forty days before you were created you were matched with this person or with this cause or matched with this child, and you said if there's to be pain here and disfiguration here, if there's to be a scar here, let it be me. That is a completely different story.

(both from Because God Loves Stories: An Anthology of Jewish Storytelling