There once was a king who had an exquisite collection of jewels. Of all his treasures, the King’s most prized gem was a large perfect diamond. After a long day of seeing to the affairs of state, the king would retreat to his private chambers to meditate on the beauty and perfection of this diamond. Gazing upon the diamond’s perfectly smooth surface, down its precise facets, to a sharp cut where all the angles and lines converge in a singular point at the bottom, the king concluded that this diamond is proof that something perfect could exist in this world. Everything else in the world was compromised, flawed.
One night a tragic thing happened. The king was holding his perfect diamond up to the light, admiring its faultless radiance, when the gem slipped from his hands and dropped to the hard stone floor. With trepidation, the king scooped up the diamond and peered into its interior. To his horror, the king perceived a long spindly crack running from the top of its crown all the way down to that precise culet – which also was not perfect anymore. The tip of the diamond was chipped.
The king summoned every kind of expert to his royal palace to repair the diamond – jewelers, gem-cutters, scientists. All of them failed. The king was distraught – his beloved diamond was now flawed, like everything else in the world.
The king searched his kingdom far and wide but could not find anyone to repair his beloved once-flawless diamond. He was about to give up, when one day a wise old artist showed up at the castle… “I heard you have a diamond that needs fixing,” said the artist, “let me see it.” The artist held the gem up to the light and she examined it for a very long time, then she looked at the king and declared, “give me a week and I will repair your diamond.”
“You can fix my diamond?!” the king responded hopefully, “everyone else has tried and failed.”
“Give me a week and I will bring the diamond back more perfect than before.”
“More perfect?!”
“Yes, more perfect.”
The king, figuring he didn’t have anything to lose, handed over the gem.
A week later, the artist returned.
“Have you fixed it?!,” asked the king anxiously.
“I have,” said the artist, with pride in her voice, “It is once again perfect… in fact, more perfect than before.”
The artist handed the diamond to the king. The king raised the diamond to the light. The crack was still there, just as before. “Do you mock me?!” hollered the king, “it is still broken!”
“Look again,” said the artist gently, as she took the diamond from the king and turned it over.
The king again held the diamond up. Now he saw: at the very top, where the crack met the tip of the diamond and its chipped culet, the artist had carved a tiny rose. Now, instead of a long, ugly crack marring the perfection of the gem, the diamond had within it the most exquisite flower, with a long spindle of a stem running from its top to the bottom.
“Here my lord,” offered the artist, “it is not only repaired, but now it is unique, more remarkable, more perfect than before.”
God did not create a perfect world. Nor did God create us to be perfect.
R. Salomon Gruenwald
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