Story

Long, long time ago lived a king who decided he's going to build for himself a beautiful palace. He hired the top contractors, the top designers. This was going to be a palace for the ages. But when it came to the throne room, this room had to be the most beautiful of all. And so a search committee was sent out to find the top artists who were going to paint murals on the wall. And finally, they narrowed the search down to two of the top artists who the king met and said, "Okay, you have a few months. I want one of you to take these two walls and the other to take the other two walls and each of you together you're going to create a masterpiece. And they got to work. And everyone noticed immediately that there was a difference between the two of them. One artist was there first thing in the morning with paint brushes and with paint and tools and he was working hard from morning till evening. The second artist would show up a little bit late and as time went on even later, some days he wouldn't even show up at all. Until that day came, the inauguration of the new palace. The king was so excited. All the subjects, everyone comes to the palace. They're standing there waiting to be shown this beautiful room. And the king starts on one side of the room and a gasp goes out from him and from everyone. The walls are beautiful animals. You can almost touch the birds. You can see the fruits on the trees. You want to pick them off. They're so luscious. They're so lifelike. Amazing. And then the curtain is removed and the other side of the room is revealed. And now everyone is puzzled. That side of the room, he hasn't done anything. There's no paint, but what everyone realizes is that he had covered it with some kind of material that was reflective. And when you looked at the wall, you saw a reflection of the other wall, a replica of what the other artists had done. I'm going to pause for a moment cuz this is quite a famous story. And most people have heard the story with a different ending than the original. That the king takes a bag of gold coins and gives it to the first artist and he said, "This is for your hard work." And then he turns to the second artist who says, "What about me, your honor?" and he points at the reflection of the gold coins in the mirror and he says, "There's your reward." But this story was written many hundreds of years ago in the he writes a different ending. He writes that the king not only found it pleasing what the second artist had done, but he rewarded him even greater than the first artist. And that's strange. Why would that be? Nakman quotes the story as well and has the same ending. And I believe what these sadikim are telling us is the following message. Every single one of us want to be a sadik. We want to be like the first artist. We want our life, we want our nom to be beautiful, to be shining, to be exactly the way it's supposed to be. But so often in life, things don't end up the way we want. And we find ourselves in places that we don't necessarily want to be. The Gmorrah tells us in every single day our overpowers us. And without Hashem's help, we would be unable to overcome the Now that's very strange. Why does Hashem give us that is stronger than us that would overpower us? Isn't the point for us to choose to have an equal fight? The Gmorrah gives us the answer. The Garra says, you know why Hashem gave you that's so powerful? Because he wants you to turn to him for help. And that's what the story is telling us that even if we're not done, but if we can reflect Hashem's light in this world, if we can be ourselves to him and say, "Hashem, I need your help. I need your help so much because I see how much more powerful than me is. It's not a mistake. It's so that we invite Hashem. We turn to him. We invite him into our lives. We reflect him in our lives. And thereby, Hashem says, "I'm going to shine a much more powerful light than you could ever have painted on your own." And that is ultimately incredibly pleasing in the king's eyes.