In the meantime, the clock was fixed, and the boy set out to bring it back to his uncle. On the way, he met one of the local villagers with whom he was friendly.
“Moshke,” said the villager. “Rent my orchard.”
“But I have no money,” said the boy.
“Rent it, and when you make some profit, pay me back,” the villager offered.
The boy rented the orchard. He then returned to his uncle and as Rebbe Yerachmiel had advised him, he did two things to upset him. The uncle became furious and threw him out of his home.
In the meantime, the fruits in the orchard grew nicely and the boy returned to Rebbe Yerachmiel, relating all that had transpired.
“Rent a storage space for all the fruits,” Rebbe Yerachmiel told him. “And rent another orchard if you can find one.”
The boy did as he was told and filled the entire warehouse with fruits, making a handsome profit. From then on, he was more and more successful, until he became a wealthy man with a large estate, fields, forests, and animals.
In this story, we see Rebbe Yerachmiel of Peshischa as a multi-faceted personality. On the one hand, he is a tzaddik whose great holiness is obvious even to a simple boy. On the other hand, he is an expert craftsman and the townspeople do not think it at all strange to direct the boy to the rebbe’s home in his capacity as a watchmaker. The tzaddik also had another vocation: Giving good advice to the people who come to him.
Every person’s life and livelihood evolve from his soul root, his ‘mazal.’ A tzaddik who knows how to see this root can direct the advice-seeker to the correct actualization of his mazal. Sometimes this will entail a change in his place of work, and sometimes he will even propose a change in his behavior that will result in his being dismissed from his original place of work, enabling him to find a completely new livelihood.
In this story, the uncle was a difficult person. But even if we are relating to a family business that is managed lovingly, there is an advantage to personal work, with the livelihood coming directly from the person’s individual labor. There is a famous saying in Yiddish that highlights this: “When you do it alone, the soul is clean.” Why is this so?
The success of a person in a family business comes from the near-by encompassing mazal, which is associated with the soul’s fourth level, the chayah (living one). This is the level that is associated with family, national, and public ties. This type of success will always leave the successful person within the boundaries of nature and the known world and will not carry him beyond. True success, above and beyond nature, comes from the distant encompassing level of the soul called the yechidah (singular one), which is also a source of mazal. This level is associated with the personal, individual connection that a person has with his Creator. At the level of the yechidah, every person is completely unique and can succeed in the most unexpected and unusual way.
