Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily. I recently heard a beautiful thought from Rabbi Shimshon Pincus that he said at an Agudah convention in the last year of his life. Around 1985, the granddaughter of the Chafetz Chaim got out of Russia. Rav Pincus met her and they spoke. He asked her some questions about her famed and renowned grandfather.
She told him that when she was a teenager, she got swept up in the winds of the time. She was excited about the new world that was out there, and she decided to leave Radin to go to college and be exposed to the big world.
When she came back, she told her grandfather, “It's time to leave the dark ages. It's time to get out of this dark place that you're in. It's time to go into the real world…look at the technological advances that are going on. Look at what they're creating, look at what they're doing. And you're just sitting here in little Radin. What exactly are you doing? What are you accomplishing? It's time to wake up in time to get out there.”
At that point, it was beginnings of World War I and a plane was flying overhead. She pointed to the plane and said, “You see that plane? Do you see what they're able to do? They're able to fly from place to place. Amazing!”
In those days, the way they fought was very primitive. They threw dynamite out of the windows of planes. That's the way they bombed places. The Chafetz Chaim responded by commenting on those two inventions. He said, “Do you see that plane? One day, the plane is going to reach the moon.”
Of course, we know the Chafetz Chaim was right. They later came up with rocket ships.
And he added, “Do you see those dynamite sticks that they throw out of the plane? They're going to create a bomb that can blow up the world.”
Again, he was right. Look at the nuclear bomb.
“But,” he said, “What they do, number one, can bring great destruction. And secondly, what they build builds the world. We build people.” And then he repeated, “we build people.”
Rabbi Pincus went on to say that it's possible that a person is very busy building. We could be building shuls, we could be building yeshivot … but we always have have to remember that the main thing to build is people. And the danger of technological advances, as we discussed previously, is that it causes us to forget about the person. There's no longer a person, there is a camera, or a machine….we're building the world, but we're not building people.
Rabbi Pincus was applying this even to the religious world. We might be building, but we cannot just build the externals and forget about building the person.
And it's interesting that when Shlomo Hamelech was at the inauguration of the Bet Hamikdash, he made a prayer. “Let Hashem, our God be with us like He was with our fathers. He shouldn't leave us, and He shouldn't forsake us.”
The Chida explains that Shlomo Hamelech was afraid that now that they were building a building, the focus of their Avodat Hashem would be on the external building and not on the person. And therefore, he said, “Hashem, don't forget about us. Be with us like You were with our forefathers.” Our forefathers didn't necessarily have the grandeur and the building. All they had was themselves.
This is an important concept because we walk into beautiful buildings and beautiful shuls and schools and all kind of edifices. And we are building. But the focus is sometimes on the outside, while we have to remember that as Jewish people, the ultimate goal is to build people.
We build people.
Have a wonderful day.