Passing the Smell Test
Because when you’re a child – even a child of sixty years old – so you live with your physical senses. You don’t smell with your mind; you smell with your olfactory nerves. And so let’s say a fellow approaches you for business and he’s clean shaven and he’s well dressed and his clothing is pressed and he smells good. So because you never trained yourself to think, he makes a favorable impression. It’s easy to deceive you.
And so as much as you appreciate the Torah learner it’s not enough – you have to awaken the awareness that the one who sits and studies Torah is the only one who smells good. And so when you see a group of yeshivah men across the street going to the yeshivah, “Ahhh, it smells beautiful!” You breathe deeply the aroma of kedushah that you see in a yeshivah man. That's how you begin elevating the greatness of a ben Torah. Anybody who goes to yeshivah, anybody who spends the day learning Gemara is to us good looking and handsome and romantic. Little by little you begin to see a certain glamour about them.
