The Tissue Box Scam

A Torah Anytime original series. My 5-year-old son came home from school the other day with this letter. It said, "Dear mommy, your son Ary has been chosen to do the of bringing in a box of tissues for the class. Thank you, Rebby." So, I'm reading this and my immediate reaction was, "Come on, really? What a cheap way for the school to save money. You guilt the parents and then you dress it up as and suddenly the class has free tissues. Very clever. But then I stopped for a second and I realized something. Maybe I'm looking at it completely wrong. Maybe the school actually is trying to teach my kid something and maybe what they're teaching him is exceptionally powerful. Maybe they're trying to teach my kid that mitzvah are everything in life and everything else is second place. Think about it. What better can you give a child than to grow up believing that doing a mitzvah, any mitzvah, is the greatest opportunity in the world? That we are here in this world to do mitzvah. that we work and make money and eat food to be able to do mitzvah, not that we do mitzvah so we keep Hashem happy enough with us so he'll let us keep on making money and eating food. No, perhaps the lesson wasn't that my son has to bring in the tissues, but that he gets to bring them in. That he was given aus and that in life we should be centrally focused on collecting those on chasing mitzvah the way the world chases everything else. Because once you start thinking like that, the whole world begins to look completely different. Suddenly, when you drive past that old age home that you've passed 10,000 times before, a thought suddenly creeps into your head, how could I not stop in once in a while and visit the people who have no one who's visiting them? That's a mitzvah waiting for me. I'm not just going to drive by. Suddenly, when you hear about an organization like, I don't know, Kai Lifeline looking for volunteers, the reaction isn't, "Oh, who has time for that?" The reaction becomes, "Of course, I'll give an hour a month. It's an opportunity. It's a mitzvah. It's the very reason I'm in this world." Suddenly, when someone needs help moving a couch or a ride to the doctor or just someone to listen to them for 10 minutes, it stops feeling like an interruption to your day and starts feeling like something else entirely. Hashem just dropped a mitzvah into my lap. How can I not jump up and run towards it? Suddenly the way you think about your future changes. Instead of asking how much more can I accumulate, you start asking a different question. How can I structure my life so I can do more mitzvah? Maybe when a person becomes financially secure, the dream isn't chasing another million and another million and another million, but freeing up time to learn more tying or to help more people or to fill life with more mitzvah. Because when you internalize this idea, you realize something profound that there are no moving trucks in the cemetery. Mitzvos are our oxygen. We should treat them like that. We should treat them like they are the most important things in the world because they are. I remember once walking down a street in Urus Island and there was an elderly woman who was sitting on the floor collecting money and I gave her a few shekele and as I was turning away to leave she reached out into her pocket and she handed me something a small piece of paper on it was written as a token of appreciation. Please say the following kiten for a certain boy to do well in yeshiva tisculitz. And I remember thinking, what? What kind of token of appreciation is that? You should tell me. You should wish me tisk. You should bless me with a long life and success and wealth. But instead, you're telling me I just did a mitzvah. But then it hit me. That's exactly the point. There is no greater endeavor in this world than being busy with mitzvah. Nothing comes close. Some people spend their lives chasing money or remodeling their homes or upgrading their cars, spending enormous amounts of time and money and mental space on clothing and shoes and stuff. But some people are lucky enough to spend their lives busy with mitzvah helping another yid giving saying to him doing one small act of and from the Torah's perspective those two lives aren't even in the same universe. Mitzvah are the real currency of existence. Everything else is light years away. So maybe that little letter my son brought home wasn't about tish at all. Maybe it was about teaching a 5-year-old something that most adults never fully learn. And that is that when Hashem gives you a chance to do a mitzvah, even something small, you didn't get stuck with a chore. You just won the lottery.