There is a good story about a woman who came to her rabbi to
complain about her husband. “Rabbi,” she cried, “You must do something about
all day and night he plays the fiddle; and if that is enough he plays on one
note all the time I’m going out of my mind!”
The good rabbi summoned the offending husband and asked him,
“Is it true that you play the fiddle?” The man gladly admitted that he did and he
beamed with delight that the rabbi has now found out about his new hobby.
“But I hear,” said the Rabbi, “that you play one note all
the time. That seems strange to me after all, there are several strings and,
thank God, you have more than one finger to play many notes.”
At this the man became upset and said, “Rabbi, please
forgive me if I seem disrespectful. But you don’t know anything about playing
fiddle. When you see other people playing on all four strings and with all the fingers
running up and down strings, do you think they are playing properly? Not at
all. They’re only searching for the right note. But as for me, I found it, and
now that I found it, I don’t intend letting go.”
The story has a moral and points to us. The trouble with
many of us is that we often are like the foolish fiddler. We also imagine that
we won’t have the truth and everyone else is wrong. But the awkward fact is
that no one can have a monopoly on truth, because total truth looking at the
isn’t value which Is impossible to achieve. It is a quality composed of so many
different parts.
Franz Rosenzweig reminded us that truth is a concept
associated only with God. The talmudic rabbis also taught, chotamo sgel
hakadosh baruch hu emet – “The seal of the Holy One, blessed be He, is Truth.” -Chaim
Pearl
Comments