Real-Easy Feel-Good Hacks

#2 The right thing is NEVER good enough

My great uncle was a British soldier stationed in Palestine at the time of the British mandate.

One day, orders came in to raid a kibbutz suspected of hiding weapons. The British were sticklers for law and order. They also hated Jews who tried to defend themselves.

In fact, they still do.

My uncle, bravely, told his commanding officer that if he did not change the orders then he, as well as the other Jewish servicemen, would go AWOL.

My uncle knew full well the consequences for such insubordination. He could have been court martialed and sent back to England in a prison ship.

Next morning he nervously went to the notice board where the orders for the day were usually posted. On it was this:

When he got back to jolly old England he told the story to my grandmother, his sister.

You would have loved my grandmother. An ardent Zionist at her core, and a proper English lady in her shell. I still miss her.

Anyway, when she heard what my uncle did she was so mad that the English channel nearly split.

"Fool!" She said, "if you had taken the orders you could have tipped off the Israelis!"

In Parsha Shemos, Pharaoh orders the midwives to kill the baby boys.

They, like my uncle, refused.

Pharaoh was far from pleased. You don't want to disappoint a king. And he demanded an explanation.

The midwives, being sharp cookies (like my grandmother) gave him some crazy story about Jewish women giving birth in the fields!

Somehow, he bought it, and they lived to see the Red Sea split.

If you read the Torah cover-to-cover you will find that praise is very sparse. Yet here it’s effusive and goes out of its way to let you know that what they did was epic.

I'm sorry to sound cynical, but when I first read that I was not impressed. Call me naive, but I feel most people would not kill little babies.

And that's true. But it's not what the Torah is praising them for.

It's what my grandmother was trying to teach me.

Sometimes doing the right thing is very hard, and sometimes it's even dangerous. But its never enough.

It's not enough to simply refuse to raid a Jewish kibbutz. And it's far from enough to refuse killing babies. If the midwives had simply done that, then Pharaoh, just like my uncle's commanding officer, would have just found someone else who would.

What they did was exceptional, they made sure the right thing got done.

That's the moral character my grandmother wanted to see in me, and what you should want to see in your grandchildren.

Please notice, this level is no more difficult, dangerous, or exertive, than doing the right thing. In fact, it can often be easier and more beneficial.

I happen to like dropping a quarter in the charity box, but it sounds more impressive then the feeling it gives us. And adding zeroes doesn't change that feeling either.

I’m all in favor of doing the right thing, but if you want to feel good about yourself, then the right thing is NEVER good enough.

There’s a big difference between giving to a cause and making a cause happen. And that difference is in how you think and how you feel. It’s the type of thinking that we use in dieting. You’re not chomping carrots because you’re supposed to; you’re focused on a number on the scale.

This entirely different way to think about the things you do anyway, is so simple and yet incredibly fulfilling. So much so, that the Torah points out that the women who thought like this created dynasties.

Don’t just do, ask, where do I want this to go?

If you want to do good, all the power to you, but if you want to feel great about yourself, then make good things happen - and feel amazing!