What are you supposed to do when you are asked to do the impossible? Most people would simply shrug their shoulders and forget about it. After all, doing the impossible is impossible, isn't it? Not necessarily.
The Torah tells us that Hashem promised Avram that he would have children (Bereishit 15:3-5). "And Avram said, 'O my Master, Lord, what can you give me if I am childless?' ... And He brought him outside, and He said, 'Look up at the sky and count the stars, can you count them?' And he said to him, 'So shall your children be.'"
Rav Meir Shapiro asks what a person would do if he were told to count the stars. One look at the myriad stars in the heavens would tell what an impossible task this was, and he would not even bother to attempt it. But that is not what Avram did. When Hashem told him to "look up at the sky and count the stars," that is exactly what he did. He began to count the stars even though doing so appeared to be impossible.
"Koh yihyeh zarecha," Hashem responded. "So shall your children be." Avram's extraordinary trait of eternal optimism, his refusal to acknowledge the impossibility of any task, will characterize his descendants. This will be the hallmark of the Jewish people. No matter how difficult a task may seem, the Jew will not despair. He will try and try and try again.
And when we try, amazing things often happen. Even if we think something is entirely beyond our meager abilities, when we try persistently we discover strengths and abilities that we never knew we possessed. We find in ourselves new reservoirs of capability, new potential that we never knew existed. We learn we can go beyond all the limits and restrictions that we had considered impenetrable boundaries.
A blind Jew once brought a volume of his Torah insights to Rav Isser Zalman Meltzer. He asked Rav Isser Zalman to take a look at one particular piece. "That piece," he remarked, "was the last piece I wrote, and then I went blind."
"What happened?"
"I worked on my sefer for many years," the man explained. "I toiled over the Gemara and Rishonim and Poskim with every fiber of my being, and my labors were blessed with some success. Some of the pieces are really very good. But they took so much effort, and I was getting older. One day, after finishing work on a chiddush, I decided that I had had enough. I just didn't have the strength to keep this up. From now on, I decided, I would continue to learn, but I would not put in the effort necessary to come up with chiddushei Torah, novel Torah insights. I wrote down my chiddush, and there and then," he paused and took a deep breath, "I became blind!"
"Did you go to doctors?" asked Rav Isser Zalman.
"Of course I went to doctors," the man replied. "And you know what they told me? They said that based on the condition of my eyes I should have been blind ten years earlier. They simply could not understand why I hadn't gone blind before."
For ten years, this man had done the impossible. He had studied and written chiddushei Torah, using eyes that should not have been functioning. But "so shall your children be." Jewish people, the descendants of Avraham, can accomplish the impossible.
Count The Stars
Rabbi Yissachar Frand
