Desert for the Brain
So when you pass a fruit stand, you stop and take a look at the red watermelons. Ahh, they’re so beautiful! A sight to see; a quarter-watermelon and the red color is blazing out announcing the sweetness and the wetness and the coldness. Ahh, a delicious meal waiting for you.
The best dessert is a slab of watermelon. Forget about the garbage that they concoct, ice cream and all kinds of chazarei. A slab of watermelon is healthy and beautiful and it tastes good. Hakadosh Baruch Hu’s dessert. And if it’s used the way Hakadosh Baruch Hu intended, it’s food for thought too.
I told you once, what I always say, that the best teshuva is the teshuva you make over a piece of watermelon in the summer. When you eat a piece of watermelon, you have to feel that “I am enjoying this now and as a result of the gratitude that I feel towards Hashem I am going to recognize Hashem in the watermelon. In my happiness and enjoyment I am going to ask myself, “Why is it that the edible part is red and the inedible part is green?”
Go at Red, Stop at Green
You have to ask yourself that question because that demonstrates the greatness of Hashem’s Wisdom that he puts color into the edible part to make it more enjoyable for us and also to let us know that this is what we can eat and when the red is all gone we shouldn’t continue to eat. We should stop. It’s not good for us to eat the rind so He changed the color.
And so while you’re chewing, while you’re enjoying the red, you should feel obligated to ask yourself, “Where does the red color come from? How did the watermelon seed have the wisdom to produce pigment out of earth and water? Water has no color at all and yet when the time comes it produces a pigment and it deposits it on the cells exactly where it is needed; where it is not needed the pigment is not deposited. Red here, white here, green here for the shell.
And that shows us the Hand of Hashem in nature and then we begin to realize the value of Hakadosh Baruch Hu’s creation and that is expected as a result of the gratitude for having a gift of a slice of watermelon.
Watermelon Teshuva
Isn’t that a good chiddush? Isn’t it worth coming to hear that? To repent when you’re eating a piece of watermelon?! It tastes good! Your saliva is flowing and you have all your teeth and you’re chewing and your stomach is still operating. Everything is working, purring smoothly. And then you think, “Now is the time. Now is the time for teshuva.”
That’s a teshuva that is „ֹבוָּכַה ‡≈ּסƒּכ „ַﬠ ַיﬠƒּ‚ַמ. That’s called teshuva me’ahava. You repent out of gratitude to Hakadosh Baruch Hu.
