Drops of Change | Mr. Charlie Harary

Great people have this amazing ability to see even the smallest things and change their lives. One of the greatest stories is the story of Rabbi Akiva. He was an unlearned shepherd walking into the fields one day and he saw a brook. And at the end of the brook there was water that sort of stopped at the brook and was dripping down onto a rock. Rabbi Akiva stopped, if you can picture the scene, and walked closer and saw this incredible sight. Water dripping, drip, drip, onto a rock and when he looked down at the rock, he saw that the rock had a hole, that somehow this water was able to burrow a hole in the rock. And he made his calculation that basically if water, which is soft, can penetrate a rock, which is hard, then Torah, which is fire, can penetrate his heart. And that moment, that scene, that lesson, led him to starting to learn to become one of the greatest Tzaddikim in the history of Klal Yisroel. Rav Noach Weinberg once spoke about this, and he said: What was it that made Rabbi Akiva so inspired? Was it just the hole? Actually, it wasn't. It was much deeper. The whole reason why the hole happened was because it was a drip. There was no water that came on the rock, it wasn't the force and the power of water that created the hole. It was actually the consistent drip that allowed, one after the other, a slow erosion of the rock. Which means that it may have been the millionth drop that made one hole, but the first drop also made a hole. You just couldn't see it. There was no one drop that made the hole. It was every drop. Rabbi Akiva realized, I've got such a long way to go. I’m in my middle ages, I don't know Alef-Beis. How am I ever going to become a successful person in Torah? But wait, even if I don't see any results, that Alef will actually make a difference. I can see now, through this story, that every single drop, whether my eye can discern or not, is actually changing my life. And so then every day has meaning and every moment is valuable, so let me get started now and let it go wherever it goes. We all want to be great in life, but you know what happens many times? Is we start down the journey and we do one, two, five, six, ten, twenty days, but we don't see a difference. Because we're waiting for the dramatic moment. But what Rabbi Akiva saw that day, and Rav Noach said is, You see, it's never how change works. Change is indiscernible to the eye when you look close. It's only when you look from far. We have to believe that every drop of goodness, every drop that we're doing for Hashem, is actually making us a different, greater person, whether we can see the change or not. Because we believe, at the end of the day, that if we're continuously every day doing that thing, we'll wake up one morning and we will see that the change that it had in our lives was beyond our imagination.