We continue with Divrei Torah from Eretz Yisrael. Rabbi Nissan Kaplan, whom we mentioned yesterday, discussed a mashal that we have heard before, but his message was very powerful. Athough I have said it in the past, he added an additional nuance.
The mashal is that there was once a bus driver, who had a very sleepy bus route.
His route, Bus 5, went from the nursing home to the hospital and back every day, with no more than 8 to 10 people on the bus daily. This driver was always jealous of Bus 27, because that bus had a busy, action-packed route to a college, with many students.
One day, the driver decided to change his bus route from 5 to 27. He drove the route to the college and had an action-packed day.
At the end of the day, he returned with hundreds of dollars in bus fare. His boss noticed and said, “Wow! How many people went to the hospital today?”
The driver explained that he hadn’t gone to the hospital, he took bus route 27 instead.
His boss exclaimed, “You took bus route 27!? The government is in charge of the bus licenses, and they give us the routes. Of course everybody would like to have the busy routes, but the government knows what is needed for their population. They know that they need certain less popular routes as well. If we don’t do our routes, there is a fine. So now we’ll have to pay a huge fine because you didn’t do the right route. Furthermore, there are people that have to get to the hospital for their procedures, and who knows what happened to them because you didn’t bring them there. We chose this route for you because it’s a nice, slow route, and you are a loyal driver. You’ve been here for a while so we wanted to give you an easier route. But then you went to chose the harder route, on top of that you got us a fine, and what’s more, people may have died on the way to the hospital. What did you do?!”
That is the mashal.
The nimshal is that everyone has a mission in life. Everybody has a route that they have to take. You can’t choose your route. God chooses it for you. We need you to do your route. Your job in life is to get to your destination. And you have to believe that God gave you enough gas to get there.
Your route is the route that God gave you and you can’t look over your shoulder at other people’s routes. The Rabbi then went on to say that sometimes in life, you might have two routes, or a change in route that you did not want. He shared his own personal, vulnerable story. He told us that wife passed away four years ago. We might come to his yeshiva and think, “Wow! look at this Yeshiva! He has 400 students in a beautiful building!” But, he said,
“You might not realize that my heart is bleeding. I have to wake up at 6 o’clock in the morning and get my children ready for the bus. They are good children, but they are sometimes difficult. They want to remind me that they don’t have a mother, and that they miss her. Today I got a call from school that my 10-year-old daughter is being bullied. I had to deal with the teacher. So I want to be a Rosh Yeshiva, but Hashem said, “No, I am also giving you the mission of being a mother as well.”
And now I have to drive my bus to the end of the route and believe that I have enough gas in the tank.”
It was an extremely moving speech.
And, aside from the main lesson, I also learned from his speech is that it’s not always what you say, but the emotion and feeling that goes along with it. Many people who heard the story already knew it, but as it says, “Things that come from the heart go into the heart.“ Sometimes you want give over a message, but it’s a cerebral message so it doesn’t always penetrate. Sometimes you need to balance that with an emotional message. Just like an emotional message alone doesn’t do much by itself, as it might just be a fleeting inspiration for that moment.
There is a book about Rabbi Chaim Shmuelevitz called Moach V’Levwhich means Brains and Heart. A person has to have a balance of brain and heart, and this is what we experienced from this Rabbi.
Going back to the Rabbi’s message, everybody has to believe that they have a mission, that they can do their mission, and that they’ll get paid very well when they complete their mission.
What a powerful lesson, and something to think about, when a person has challenges in life.
Have a wonderful day.