The Message of Christmas New Year Holiday Season: You Are God’s Partner: God Needs You: Marc Gafni
The powerfully explosive and world changing idea in the great biblical wisdom tradition is that we are all somehow partners with divinity in creating a better world. The core idea in the biblical lineage teaching is that God’s call to every person in love is a call to unique partnership.
One of the simplest but most poignant and powerful ways the Kabalistic masters expressed this was in story. Here is one that we love to tell about the Master of Opt, Abraham Joshua Heschel.
The master from Opt was troubled. His blessings did not seem to be working. He would bless a couple for fertility and they would remain childless. He would bless a man for prosperity and the man would remain destitute. Now if that was not enough, everyone knows the saying, “Nothing more bothers the bishop than rumors of a saint in the parish.” On top of it all, the Rebbe from Opt had a local saint. There was a tavern owner on the outskirts of Opt to whom people were flocking for blessings. And his blessings worked.
Truth be told, the master from Opt was a very great man and very much wanted to know what he was doing wrong. He figured that the tavern keeper must be a very pious man. So he decided to go to his tavern in disguise. Perhaps he could learn the secret of his piety.
The master frequented the tavern for a week — and he could not believe what he saw.
The tavern keeper was no pious man at all. True, he seemed to love his customers and they felt at home in the tavern, yet he never prayed or thanked God for his food, he seemed more than a tad too friendly with the barmaids…why, he didn’t even own a prayer shawl…and the list of his failings went on and on. Yet people lined up every day for his blessings, which he dispensed with good enough humor even as he refused any recompense.
It was a mystery that the master could bear no longer. In the middle of a busy day, he dropped the cloak of his disguise. The tavern stopped as everyone recognized the master from Opt. He walked up to the tavern keeper and said, “I insist that you tell me your secret. Why do your blessings work?”
The tavern keeper was not a man of false modesty, so he answered directly. “It is simple,” he said. “It is because of my partner.”
“And who is your partner?” the master demanded.
“Well,” said the tavern keeper, “When I went to open this place, I made a deal with God. I promised him I would give twenty five percent of the profits to charity if he would help me run the place. You know, it is not easy, running a tavern. Every morning I have a business meeting with my partner, a short meeting — I don’t have that much time for him — where we look over the day and its challenges. Our business goal is to make people feel like my tavern is their place — their home — and to turn a profit. At the end of every day, I take out a quarter of my profits for charity.”
As the tavern keeper spoke, the master began to understand the lesson he was being taught on simplicity. The man before him was no philosopher and certainly no saint. Yet he was God’s partner in the most real, down-to-earth and honest way the master could imagine.
The master realized that he had forgotten about simplicity and gotten lost in dogma, doctrine, and the practice of piety. He was so moved that he went over to the tavern keeper and hugged him, simply, for several minutes. Then, very quietly, with the kind of true humility he had not felt in years, he asked for a blessing…from God’s partner.
Fabulous! What a way to wake up in the morning! Knowing — quite simply and unabashedly — that your are God’s partner. Now of course that implies that God needs us just as we need God. We are enmeshed and inseparable.
marc gafni
posted on marcgafni.com
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