"Light Up Your Face With Gladness"

In the summer of '06 I asked the proprietor of Moriah bookstore in The Old City if he had any books relating to Torah and humor. He recommended Chiyuchah Shel Torah, a lovely book of vorts on the parshiyot collected by long time mechanech (mostly in Ma'aleh high school in Yerushalayim) Rabbi Yehudah Greenspan's son. The sefer is similar in title and more to Rabbi Abraham Twerski's Smiling Each Day. Both of the books have nice stories and thoughts and neither of them are laugh out loud funny, often not funny at all.

I took Chiyuchah Shel Torah off the shelf on Friday for the first time in a

while after I heard Rabbi Shalom Rosner quote from it in his online shiur (which I finally checked out for the first time because my nephew Kovi and my neighbor Andrew are such big fans of it). In his thoughts on Eikev Rabbi Greenspan cited a story about the Netziv asking a (former) student "Vas machst du?" Understanding the question colloquially - to be asking how someone else is - the fellow said that both his health and livelihood were fine. The Netziv asked the question again and the guy said, : "I already answered that my health and parnasah are fine." The Netziv explained that he was asking the question in the more literal sense - what are you doing? - while the student was not answering the question because he was listing things that G-d was doing for him, not what he was doing for G-d.

In Smiling Each Day's entry for the twentieth of Av, Rabbi Twerski tells the following joke: Two patients who shared a hospital room each had a broken leg. The Dr. came in and examined the first man. As the doctor moved and examined his leg the gentleman wailed in pain. Next the doctor checked out and manipulated the leg of the second guy. The man didn't make a sound. After the doctor left the room the first man said to the second man there, "I am amazed at how you held back from screaming in pain." The second fellow replied, "Are you kidding? After I saw what he did to you, I showed him my good leg." The moral is that people often hold back from exposing their issues to people who can help them spiritually. Just like the doctor can't diagnose your broken leg if you show him the healthy one, spiritual healers can't help us if we hide our flaws and flaunt our good side."