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Have you met some of these people who consider themselves so important that they cannot busy themselves with little things? What they must do is so serious that they cannot do something as simple as giving directions to people who lost their way. Someone else should deal with it…
Things were different in the Holy Temple.
The Kohanim, the priests, had many jobs to do in the Temple: Bless the people, teach them the laws of the Torah, make the sacrifices etc. But they also had to clean the Temple and take the garbage outside of the city.
One would think that the priests who were dealing with the garbage were not the same as those who did the sacrifices or blessed the people. That there were differences in positions and hierarchy. In other words, the important priests would deal with the teachings and the blessings and the rest would deal with the cleaning.
But the truth is that it was the same exact priests that did all the jobs. They changed their clothes and went to do everything, from blessing the people to throwing out the garbage. They did whatever was necessary in the Temple, even those activities that we usually don’t put up on Facebook or the social media.
All these works were stages in the service of G-d. It included the preparations before, the cleaning afterwards, and everything in between. There were no lesser or more important jobs.
This is how Rabbi Chiya acted in the time of the Talmud. He saw that there were many villages that did not have a teacher or a rabbi. The people did not know the Torah and they were in danger of forgetting their Judaism. He decided to take the situation in his own hands. He planted linen and when it grew, he made ropes. With those ropes, he made a net with which he caught a deer. He slaughtered the deer, gave its meat to poor people and after processing its skin, he wrote on it the books of the Torah and the Mishna. With these books, he went from village to village, gathered the children and taught each one, one book. Then, he told them to teach one each other what they had learned, while he would continue on to the next village.
Rabbi Chiya, even though he was a very important and great rabbi, did not hesitate to do a series of “little things” in order to help the situation and serve G-d.
Let us also try to act in this way. Let us not think that various “small things” are not fit for us but let us fulfill G-d’s will in any circumstance.
Shabbat Shalom,
Hanna