What A Princeton Student Taught Me

For a long time, I gave classes and did outreach at Princeton University. I had an apartment on the campus and I would go from time to time and I would bring some food. I would give some classes and speeches. And the very first time I gave a class, I brought Mike's chicken from Lakewood, New Jersey. Delicious chicken. So, I bring all this food and I set it all up and everyone piles in, but they barely touch the food. A couple people take a little bite, but I brought enough chicken to feed an army. I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I'm gonna have so bring back so much leftovers. It's embarrassing." Eventually, about halfway through the class, the door opens and a boy named Noah walks in. Now, Noah was not your typical Princeton brainiac short future plasma physics professor. He was a 6'5 broad shoulder kind of guy, and he looked like the kind of guy who could polish off an entire platter of chicken in one sitting. So, I'm thinking to myself, "Okay, great. He'll make a major dent in the chicken." He sits down. He doesn't take a crumb. So, I'm thinking to myself, like, that's weird. So, I said, "You know what? I'm going to ask him." I said, "Noah, you don't like chicken?" He said, "No, I love chicken." I said, "Okay, so what's the what's the problem? It's not kosher enough for you." What do you want? He said, "No, I don't keep kosher." I said, "Okay, so so why do you have any chicken?" Listen to what he said. He said, "I'll tell you why. because I'm on the Princeton rowing team. And you know how it is in the IV Leagues, they don't really care about football or basketball. They're not really good at soccer. But rowing they take very seriously. And before each match, the coach puts us on a scale to see if we are the correct weight for he doesn't want anyone weighing down the boat. Tomorrow we're racing against Harvard. And if I eat one piece of chicken and I'm one pound overweight, I can cause my entire team to lose. That one pound could be the difference between victory and defeat. And that I'm not willing to do to my team. You hear that? This guy won't eat a single piece of chicken because he refuses to weigh down his rowing team. Can you imagine if we lived like that? Not just about chicken, but about every single part of our lives. If we truly understood that every choice we make either drags the entire world down or lifts it higher, how careful would we be? How fiercely would we protect the light that I try to entrust in us? We'd weigh every bite and every word and every action like everything depends on it because it does. That's the fire we need when we face the yuman. The time of the year that we remind ourselves that we're not random bystanders in this world doing whatever we want. We are soldiers in Hashem's army carrying a mission the entire world needs us to fulfill. And when we stumble, we don't brush it off or give up. We fall to our knees and we beg Hashem for the strength to rise stronger and to fight harder and to carry that light forward. If you take the words L and Rashashana and Yamiper and Hashana Rabba, do you know what acronym they form? The word Ary for this is the time of year where we roar like a lion, where we unapologetically declare our allegiance to Hashem and to spreading his light in the world. That is this time of year that we are entering and that is the perspective one needs to have while approaching and Yam Kipper and Rashashana. Not that I'm a horrible person, and forgive me, but that I've gotten distracted and I want to get back to being your faithful ambassador, the most important ambassadors on earth.