Excerpting: “The Power of Shema” by Rabbi Meyer Yedid. Artscroll. 390 pages. 2024. ISBN-10:1422642607.

The love of kedushah takes us to the highest places in life.

I want to share a story with you. There was a little boy in Boro Park. If you looked at this boy, you would think: This kid has little self-esteem and little kedushah. When this story took place, the boy was sitting on a corner. On that same corner was a man with a little setup; he was selling helium balloons. The boy was watching him. Every few minutes, this man would fill up a balloon with helium, and just let the balloon go, let it float up into the sky. That’s how he advertised his balloons.

The boy sat there transfixed. He saw the man make red balloons, green balloons, yellow balloons, and blue balloons, and every once in a while, he saw the man let one rise up.

After a few hours, the boy turned to the man and said, “Sir, can I ask you a question? I see you have such beautiful balloons — red, green, yellow, and blue. And I see how high they go up. But what happens if you have an old balloon that has no color at all? Can that balloon also go up?”

You know, people ask questions based on who they are and what they are going through. They ask questions based on their own experiences. This man heard the question and understood what the child was really asking.

He told the young boy, “Listen, young man: It’s not the red or the green or the yellow or the blue that makes the balloon fly. If you fill up a balloon with helium, it’s gonna go all the way up no matter what color it is!”

And that is a story for all of us.

What we look like on the outside doesn’t make us fly, no matter how big or how beautiful or how expensive our balloons are. It’s nice to look good and it’s nice to act with kavod. But that doesn’t make us fly. What makes us fly is the helium inside of our balloons. That’s the kedushah that we have been discussing here.

The Maggid MiDubno expresses this idea with a beautiful parable: A man opened up a retail store and displayed his merchandise in the window of the store. On opening day, one of his friends came into the store to check it out. The friend looked around and realized that the storeowner had put his entire stock in the window. Every item the storeowner had to sell was in that window. There was nothing in the rest of the store.

The friend was very surprised. He turned to the storeowner and he said, “I don’t understand: You put all your merchandise in the window? You’re supposed to put a few samples in the window and leave the rest of the stock in the back. Why did you put all your stock in the window?”

The storeowner told him, “You’re right. When a person has a lot of merchandise, they put only a few samples in the window. But if you have a small amount of merchandise, then you put it all in. That’s all I have.”

That’s what the Dubno Maggid says. A person who’s full of merchandise only has to put a few things in the window, not too much. But if you don’t have a lot inside, you have to put it all out there.

And that’s the story of our lives too.

There is a very powerful lesson in life here: In order to fly, we need helium. Our helium is kedushah. And if we love that feeling of kedushah, we know what to call it: ahavat Hashem. Kedushah means that your neshamah feels the presence of G-d within you. When we know that and want that, we are fulfilling not only our mission in life — to fly high — but also the mitzvah of ahavat Hashem.

May Hashem give us the siyata d’Shmaya to open up this channel of ahavat Hashem in our lives, and to be mit’aneg, to take true pleasure in Hashem.

Reprinted from “The Power of Shema” by Rabbi Meyer Yedid with permission from the copyright holder, ArtScroll Mesorah Publications.