Today’s lesson is from Shabbos 156b.
Shmuel and the astrologer ???? (Avleit) sat together saw some men heading into a swamp.
Avleit “This man will go in, but he will not come back, a snake will bite him and he will die.”
While they were sitting, the man went and he came back.
Avleit went and through off the man’s pack. In the pack he found a snake that been cut into two pieces. Shmuel said “What have you done?
The man said “Every day we all throw our bread together and eat it. Today, there was one of us who did not have any bread, I told them, I am going to get up and collect. When I reached that person, I pretended to take from him so that he would not be embarrassed.”
Shmuel said “You have done a good deed. It says in Proverbs 10:2 ‘Charity saves from death’ and not just unusual death, but from death itself.”
Another story….
Akiva had a daughter that the astrologers that told him “The day she enters her bridal chamber a snake will bite her and she will die.” Akiva was very worried over this matter.
On the day of her wedding she took her broach and stuck it in a wall. It happened that it lodged in the eye of a snake. In the morning, when she took the broach out of the wall, the dead snake followed , stuck to the brooch.
Akiva asked “What have you done?”
She said to him “In the afternoon, a pauper came and called out from the doorway, but everyone was busy at the wedding banquet and no one heard him. I stood up and took my portion that had been given to me and I gave it to him.
Akiva said “You have done a good deed” and then he expounded on proverbs 10:2 saying “”And charity saves from death’, and not just from an unusual death but from death itself.”
Zale says…
What can we learn from this story besides the obvious? Each of the protagonists in the story treated somebody else with kindness and no expectation of reward. The reward came in a way they did not ever expect. If we act in this way everyday, rewards will come to us in ways we never expected.
What The Heck Was This?
Every day I work a little on a reference book of each person in the Talmud. It will include their experiences documented in the Talmud, who their teachers were, who their students were, where they lived and where they visited.
I expect the book will be of interest to about 37 people and another few hundred around the world.
But, as I am writing my book, I am also gathering stories of these people and some of these stories make interesting reading on leadership.
This is one such story and a lesson I think we can apply in our everyday lives.
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