Hodu La'Hashem Ki Tob !
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Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of SIMHA, the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health Awareness. I would like to share two of my favorite stories on these topic of appreciating your mission and appreciating the impact that you have.
Story number one is one I'm sure you’ve heard before, because it's one of my favorites, but for those who haven’t, it'll be worthwhile.
There was a man who lived in Israel who dreamed of becoming an Egged bus driver.
The job offered good benefits, a good retirement plan, and it was a prestigious job in those days. You needed a lot of pull to get it. After a lot of hard work, he finally got the job and was assigned a route. He’d start off at the beginning of town where there were a few old age homes, pick up the people and take them to physical therapy, to doctors, to dialysis, and to everything else that older people need. He’d spend his days doing this sleepy run, waiting for the wheelchairs to get on and get off. After a few months of this, he had a midlife crisis. ‘This is what I dreamed of? This is what I strived for? This is boring! This is not exciting; this is not thrilling. One day, he decided That's it. He'd had enough. He decided to take the run that he felt was the most exciting run- the Kotel run. He pulled up at the Kotel with a long, accordion bus, with pushing and shoving and children and baby carriages, security guards.. the works. That's what he was looking for. Excitement. He was thrilled. He did that run four or five times that day, and he was on top of the world.
When he got to the bus station that night the manager looked at all his ticket stubs and asked, “What's going on? You had 120 passengers on each run? You normally have 20. How how'd you get so many old people on your run?” The bus driver admitted, “To tell you the truth, I was actually a little bored with my run, so I took the Kotel run.”
“You took the Kotel run?” the manager replied, “How could you do that? Do you know how many people were waiting to get to their appointments?! Who knows if someone died because you didn't get them to their place on time! You’re going to be fined or fired for what you did!”
That is the mashal.
The nimshal is that in life, we all have our mission. We all have our bus to ride. It's not up to us to decide which bus route we're going to run. That's the manager's job. Not all of the runs have neon lights and excitement and thrills. You might just be a plain, old mom or a simple man supporting your family, without your name on any buildings or any organizations to run, or anything like that.
Your mission might be to live your life the way you're supposed to. And that is supposed to bring satisfaction and fulfillment, like knowing that you're getting those people to the dialysis that they need.
Our second story is about an elderly man, who was a little sickly, and started learning Gemara late in his life, one summer in the mountains
Every day, he’d go to the Bet Midrash in the bungalow colony, sit down with his ArtScroll Gemara and break his head. One day he was feeling a little tired and a little lazy and he didn't come. Rabbi Pluchok (if I remember correctly) met him and asked where he’d been that morning. The man answered, “It's really very hard for me to learn. I started late in life. Do you think Hashem really knows the difference if I come or if I don't come?”
The rabbi replied with the following true story, which he used as a mashal: There was a famous Italian composer whose name was Arturo Toscanini. He was interviewed by a journalist towards the end of his life. When the journalist came in, Toscanini was listening to a live orchestra playing one of his pieces.
As he was listening, he commented that there should be 20 violins playing in this hundred-piece orchestra, but one of the violins was missing. The journalist couldn’t believe that Toscanini could pick that up over the radio. When he finished the interview, he got into a cab, went down to the theater where they were playing, went backstage, and sure enough, he discovered that there were 19 violinists playing, with one empty stand with a violin box on it. He found out that one of the violinists called in sick that day. Toscanini was right! He was able to detect the missing violin.
That's the mashal. The nimshal, the Rabbi tells this man, is that “if Toscanini, a flesh and blood man can pick up a missing violinist, God can pick up when you are missing as well, because everybody has a job. Everyone has a mission in God's large orchestra.”
That is supposed to give us hizuk and help us realize that we are doing something. This should give a person meaning and purpose and help with his emotional wellness.