The Things We Step On
A Slab of Watermelon
Rav Avigdor Miller used to ask why Rosh Hashanah comes at the end of the summer.
His answer was that Hashem is the architect who planned this universe, and He placed the Day of Judgment right after the season when everything is ripe. “The best time for teshuvah is riding the wave of happiness and prosperity.”
We assume teshuvah requires thorns. Fast days, hard times, a hospital corridor. Rav Miller pointed out that the original plan had none of that. In Gan Eden, Hashem could have created fast days for Adam HaRishon. He could have created plants with thorns, plants that needed a lot of work before they could be eaten. Instead there were only good times. “That was the original plan — that man would choose to be good due to happiness. The happiness he enjoyed would fill him with overwhelming gratitude to the One Who gave him all that good.”
And that plan, he said, is still valid and still accessible. “If you pass a fruit stand and see red watermelons — ah, what a beautiful sight! The red colors are blazing, announcing the sweetness, the wetness, and the coldness. The best dessert is a slab of watermelon. Forget about the garbage they concoct like ice cream and all kinds of chazerai. A slab of watermelon is healthy, as well as beautiful and tasty. It’s Hashem’s dessert.”
Then came the instruction. “Walk into a fruit store, stand there for three minutes and look around. Don’t buy anything. Go in just to soak in the sights. Let your eyes drink in the glories of Hashem’s summer.”
He meant it literally, and he did it. He once walked into a fruit store and a group of bachurim spotted him standing there. Figuring the Rav shouldn’t have to wait on line behind them, they offered to let him check out first.
“No,” Rav Miller said. “I’m just browsing.”
Some people browse bookstores. Rav Miller browsed fruit stores.
The Alter of Slabodka, in the middle of Av, used to leave the yeshivah where he was the mentor and travel back to Kelm to sit as a disciple — an old man, half the month of Av, preparing for Elul. Av is a month of happiness, and happiness is ideally suited for teshuvah.
Which puts us, right now, in exactly the right place on the calendar.
One Hundred Times a Day
Parshas Eikev contains the line where Moshe Rabbeinu sums up the entire avodah: “Mah Hashem Elokecha shoel mei’imach — What does Hashem your God ask of you” (Devarim 10:12). He lists yirah, ahavah, walking in His ways, serving with all your heart — and introduces it all with the word mah, as if to say: it’s only this much.
Rabbi Meir reads the word differently. Don’t say mah, say mei’ah — one hundred. A person is obligated to make one hundred brachos every day (Menachos 43b).
Rav Miller’s read on that is not about arithmetic. “What Rabbi Meir is telling us is that one hundred times a day, you must enjoy this world and feel gratitude to Hashem.” A brachah that isn’t gratitude, he said, isn’t a brachah. It’s words.
The Kuzari writes that one of the reasons for brachos is that they increase your pleasure — you eat the apple differently when you stop first and notice it. Rav Miller’s rebbi argued with him. It isn’t one of the reasons. It’s the reason.
And when we don’t do it, he had a picture for that too. A man is standing waist-deep in a stream of clean water, flagging down cars: “Please stop and give me a drink.” You’d say he’s out of his mind. Bend down. “People are standing up to their waist in water, but they don’t bother to bend down and drink.”
Or the sixteen-year-old who won’t wash a dish. “What am I getting out of you?” — besides the bed, the three meals, the clothing, the doctor bills, the dentist, the tuition. We shake our heads at her, said Rav Miller, and she is a mashal for every one of us.
Six O’Clock on Ocean Parkway
His practical suggestion was a walk. Meet me tomorrow morning, six o’clock, corner of Avenue R and Ocean Parkway, and we’ll study the happiness of life.
First you have to wake up. He remembered a man in his shul who went to sleep one night, and in the morning his wife came in and said, “Mordechai! Wake up!” Mordechai didn’t move. It was all over. A young man, by the way. Don’t take it for granted.
Then the bathroom. Don’t say it’s just nature — he knew a very wealthy man with no kidneys who spoke about the good old days when he could go normally. Then walking: “You’re a trapeze artist when you walk.” Then the sky: “Hashem is painting a blue sky for me to enjoy.” Then eyes — and here he would picture the blind man with the white stick tapping down the street, and ask what that man would do if he suddenly received your eyes. Would he mumble pokei’ach ivrim? “Oh, no! He would say it like a man drinking the most precious champagne, sipping every word. Baruch — ah, ah, ah! Atah! Hashem! Every word is a diamond!”
No money to jingle? You have teeth to click. Teeth are better than money. And at the end of the day, sleep — an old man once told him, “Ich hub farloren dem shluff — I lost my sleep.”
“Once you get into the mode of thanking Hashem for everything, you’re going to change your character. You’ll start loving Hashem. And you’re going to see that this isn’t just the road to come close to Hashem — it’s also the royal road to fulfillment and happiness in life.”
The Other Heel
Now turn the coin over.
Rashi tells us eikev also means heel. And there is a second set of small things that live down at our heels — not the gifts we fail to notice, but the sins we walk over.
David HaMelech asks what a man should fear in his day of trouble. He answers: “Avon akayvei yesubeini — the sin of my heels surrounds me” (Tehillim 49:6). Some sins reach up to your head. You know they’re big, because you’re sinking in them. Those he isn’t worried about — he knows about them, he’s frightened of them, he’s done teshuvah for them. It’s the ones at the heels. “Aveiros she’adam dash b’akeivav — the sins a man tramples under his heels” (Avodah Zarah 18a). On the Day of Judgment they rise up and surround him, and he finds fingers pointed at him by opponents he never knew existed.
Rav Miller described two kinds. The first are the things people consider permissible, or at least not serious. And even if the assessment were correct, he said, there is no such thing as a small sin that a person never regretted. Without teshuvah, no sin is small.
The second kind are the sins so easy to fix that a person never gets to them. Almost no effort to avoid, almost no effort to repair — and because it’s easy, it stays on the list. Someday. Later on. Nothing to worry about now.
The Gemara’s leading example is onaas devarim. The Torah says twice, “Lo sonu ish es amiso — You shall not vex your fellow” (Vayikra 25:17) — once regarding money and once regarding words. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai says words are worse. Money comes out of a man’s property; words come out of his heart, his mind, his health. And money can be returned. A sentence cannot.
Rav Miller drew the storekeeper: honest weights, exact change, and a sharp tongue. He insults customers. Across the street sits a man who is cunning with money and has never in his life hurt anybody’s feelings — easygoing, takes back the spoiled milk with a smile. According to the Gemara, said Rav Miller, we need a new attitude toward those two. The “honest” one is the thief. He isn’t taking your money. He’s taking your happiness.
Then he brought it inside the house. A husband walks in worn out from a day of being harassed by his boss. How easy it would have been to say one encouraging word. Instead — at best nothing, and sometimes salt in the wound: “It’s your fault, you never take my advice.” Multiply that by a year of small remarks and it accumulates into heaps.
Nobody counts those. That’s precisely why they’re dangerous.
“Mommy Said Stop Working Like a Dog”
A family came home from a trip. The wife took the children inside; the husband stayed out to empty the van — suitcases on the driveway, briefcases, pretzels, cups, licorice, ice cream that nobody realized melts. He went in for the dust buster and came back out to vacuum.
In the middle of it, his eight-year-old daughter came running down the driveway. “Mommy said stop working like a dog and come in the house and rest.”
He stopped. “Mommy said what?”
She repeated it.
And he thought: that’s strange. My wife doesn’t talk like that.
He dropped everything and ran inside. There was shattered glass on the floor. His wife was standing there shaking, her lips turning colors. He sat her down, called Hatzolah, and they raced to the hospital. He davened in the hallway for a few hours until the doctor came out and told him she would be fine — and added, “You got here not a minute too soon. Had you waited a little while, this would have been over.”
Afterward the husband said it plainly. “The purity of my wife’s speech saved my home. In most houses, if a wife says a line like that, it means nothing. If she had just sent a message that I should come in and rest, I would have said, ‘Sure, when I’m done’ — and walked in twenty minutes later. Ten minutes too late. But because she never uses words like that, I knew something was wrong.”
A word she never said, said once, bought ten minutes. That is what lives at the heels.
The Baal Shem Tov’s Tefillin
Reb Nachum of Chernobyl was poor — not no-air-conditioning poor. No-food poor. Sukkos was coming and he owned nothing of value except a pair of tefillin handed down from the Baal Shem Tov. He traded them for an esrog.
When he brought it home and his wife heard what he had given up, she was so distraught that she bit off the pitom. The esrog was pasul.
He stayed perfectly calm. She asked him how.
“The Baal Shem Tov’s tefillin I don’t have,” he said. “The esrog I don’t have. Shalom bayis I also shouldn’t have?”
Rav Yisrael Reisman adds the point: shalom bayis is no less a davar b’kedushah than tefillin. When there is peace between husband and wife, the Gemara says the Shechinah dwells between them. Literally.
Worth More Than a Glass of Milk
The two halves are one thought.
Open your eyes to the hundred things Hashem hands you before breakfast — and open your eyes to the small things you can hand somebody else. A half minute standing outside your own front door with your hand on the knob, planning one encouraging sentence. A face that doesn’t make a stranger pay for the fact that your morning went badly.
“Gadol hamalbin shinayim l’chaveiro yoser mimashkeihu chalav” — greater is one who shows his teeth to his friend in a smile than one who gives him milk to drink (Kesubos 111b). You’d hand a thirsty Jew a bottle of milk without thinking twice. The Gemara says he is thirstier for the smile.
Both directions are gratitude. The first is noticing what came into your hands. The second is noticing that something is in your hands to give.
And the season is right. It’s Av, everything is ripe, and Rav Miller told us where to go stand for three minutes. Gratitude is the shortest road back.
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