Parables

There is a fellow who owns a jewelry store in Israel. One day a nine year old girl walked into the store and said, “I am here to buy a bracelet.” She looked through the glass cases and pointed to a bracelet that was $3,000. The man behind the counter asked her, “You want...

"So, I've always been an avid reader. And at one point in my early sobriety I became a little obsessed with death, so I was poking around all the used bookstores in my neighborhood for books that were a little... well, macabre, I guess. Anyway, I found this one book that ...

One of the big demoralizers and deterrents to spiritual progress, is the feeling that I'm anyway in the mud and G-d surely isn't interested in me now. Even if we are making good progress in general but now we had a slip or fall, we get this feeling that "I'm anyway far ...

Imagine: you had finally won the BIG PRIZE! Each morning, your bank will deposit $86,400 in your personal account for your use. However, this prize has rules: 1. Everything that you didn't spend during each day would be taken away from you. 2. You may not simply transfe...

$20,000 in 1956 would be worth $175,000 today. That’s the price point at which Norman Larsen – a self-educated chemist with only a high school diploma to his name – sold his newly invented water displacement formula. That is quite a bargain considering the fact that the...

I've always had this weird thing in me... Whenever I would destroy something of value, I felt a high. When I was in highschool, I would secretly burn books and clothes of mine when I felt down. Nothing gave me a bigger high than taking a $20 and watching it burn, or break...

Let’s say, for example, that you just got done with a 10 mile run on a hot day. You come inside and there are two glasses of water on the kitchen table. One is regular water from the tap; the other is salt water. Both look the same. Both are water. But while one glass ...

The yetzer hara deludes people to thinking that life is for pleasure. Looking back upon one’s life and realizing that it was all in futility, is the despair expressed by King Solomon in Ecclesiastes, “Nothingness of nothingness—all is nothingness.” A man came across a p...

A 10-year-old boy decided to study judo despite the fact that he had lost his left arm in a devastating car accident. The boy began lessons with an old Japanese judo master. The boy was doing well, so he couldn’t understand why, after three months of training the master ...

Member: “You say that when you fall, you fall to go higher, but why does it have to be that way? I'm recognizing a lot that I didn't see before. Yes, I'm in a better place in a way. But why can't it be different? And I don't think it's worth breaking Shabbos and knowing I...