Majorities may rule, but they do not judge. This is each person’s task and bigness has nothing to do with it.
Consider for a moment: Commerce is concerned with profit. Nations are concerned with security. Nature is concerned with survival. Only human beings are concerned with moral values, with ethics, with ideals.
And, because this is true – and it is true – our task is clear enough. First, we must know what is ours and ours only. We, and we alone, hold the key to life. Without each of us, all is a jungle. All is darkness. And, we must be prepared to speak out and defend what it is we truly are, and what it is we truly represent upon this earth.
More important, by far than the words we speak, or preach, or write, is the life we choose to live.
The Baal Shem Tov, some 200 years ago, discussed the role that human beings must play upon this earth; and this is what he said: “We each must know that from the time of creation there was never created another human being exactly like each of us. If there had been, then there would have been no reason for our creation. Humankind’s goal is to fulfill one’s own individuality.”
This is still our goal. The goal that says we matter. We are, one by one, the only significant thing there is upon this earth! And because of our uniqueness, our own individual lives are, for each of us, the only ones that really matter.
There was once a man who saw in the newspaper a map of the world. Taking a pair of scissors, he cut the map into many jagged pieces, and brought the jig-saw puzzle to his son, challenging him to put it together. In a surprisingly short period of time, the boy returned with the map intact.
When the father questioned how he had done it so rapidly and so well, the boy replied, “It was easy. On the other side of the page, there was a picture of a man. So I put the man together and the world took care of itself.”
On one side, the map of the world – on the other side, the face of a person. I am not prepared to say which is the side that is greater or more important. I am not prepared to say which is the side that is up and which is the side that is down. I only know which is the side that faces God. And so do you … and so do you.
