Welcome to the Daily Holy Story. The Holy Chafetz Chaim used to tell the following story to his students to send them a message. The great Holy Maggid miDubna, Rabbi Yaakov Ba'al HaMeshalim (Master of Parables), used to tell beautiful parables all over town. From town to town, he would tell these parables.
One time, he was walking from village to village, and in the middle of the village he saw a blind man walking with his 11-year-old son. It was cold, windy, and rainy. They looked destitute. He went over to them and asked where they were headed. They told him they had no food in their house and were going to a soup kitchen to get some food. They looked very raggedy and very poor. It became known to the Maggid miDubna that the man had no wife. He was a widower, walking with his 11-year-old son in the middle of the street in the freezing weather, without any good clothing for the winter.
So he turned to them and invited them to come to his house and maybe have a meal. The blind man told his son, “Let’s go to the soup kitchen. Forget about this guy.” Maggid miDubna taught him to insist that they should come to him. The 11-year-old boy turned to his father and told him, “Daddy, maybe we should go with him. Let’s go with him, let’s try it.” So he convinced his father, and they went to the house of the Maggid miDubna. The Holy Maggid miDubna himself prepared a meal for the two of them, the 11-year-old boy and the old blind father.
They sat down and ate, and the father turned to his son and told him, “The food tastes delicious over here. It’s very good food.” Then the Maggid miDubna turned to them and said, “You know, I can give you a room over here, and you can sleep in my house instead of going back to your little cottage at the end of town with no heat. I see you’re cold and shivering.” After trying to convince him, the father and son finally agreed, and they stayed in the Maggid miDubna's house.
Then the Maggid miDubna found out that they were very poor and that the boy didn’t have a yeshiva to go to. The Maggid miDubna proposed to the father that he would send his son to a cheder (elementary school) on his account in order to get a little bit of a Jewish education.
After a little cajoling, the father agreed. They ended up living in the house of the Maggid miDubna, eating in his house, and the young boy going to yeshiva. After a while, the father passed away, and the boy was left as an adopted child by the house of the Maggid miDubna. Little by little, the boy grew up, became very, very intelligent, and ended up becoming a very great rabbi. The great rabbi’s name was none other than Rabbi Shlomo Kluger, one of the great sages of Am Yisrael (the people of Israel). He wrote 375 books, like the numerical value of his name, Shlomo, to teach us that when a person has an opportunity to do chesed (kindness), he never knows how far that chesed will go. And that was the greatness of the Maggid miDubna. Thank you for listening and have a wonderful, wonderful day.