Dubno Maggid - Clearing The Debris Is A Thankless Job!
A
devastating fire completely destroyed a house in the city, and the owner
was left destitute and penniless. His kind neighbors found him a small
cellar for him to live with his family. Their conditions were
terrible. Each day they dumped all the garbage that accumulated in the
cellar on the site of their old burned down home. The pile of garbage
on the site grew higher day by day.
One day the plight of this
family came to the attention of a wealthy minister in the city. In his
goodness he told them to clean up the site and he will rebuild
a home for them, far more beautiful than the original one.
Cleaning up the
site was no easy task. The owner worked very hard and even hired an
expensive cleaning crew to collect and haul away all the garbage that
had accumulated. After the lot was cleaned up, the minister kept his
promise and built for them a beautiful new house.
After the
house was up, it came to the minister's attention that the owner was
showing off to people that he and the minister split the expenses of
building the new house. Really annoyed at the owner's audacity, the
minister called him and demanded an explanation.
The owner
justified his attitude by explaining how much work he put into cleaning
the site and showing him copies of the bills totalling an enormous
amount of money. "Fool!" screamed the minister. "Who created the mess
if not you? All I asked was for you to clean up the mess. The
beautiful house was built by me alone!"
The Dubno Maggid
explains that sometimes we feel very proud of our Avodas Hashem. We
stop doing and speaking things we shouldn't. We work on our Middos.
At the end we feel like we deserve a great reward for it. "Fool!" says
Hashem. This was a mess that you yourself created and you don't
deserve credit for cleaning it up.
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