A beautiful vort from Rav Yankele Galinsky Shlita.
Rashi quotes the midrash that Eliezer wanted Yitschok to marry his daughter, to which Avraham said: You are Orur and I am Baruch; Orur cannot marry Baruch.
One can only imagine, how Eliezer must have felt about this. What is more, Chazal say that Eliezer was an exceedingly great person, and here Avraham is telling him that he prefers a girl from Aram (Besuel and Lavan!) to his daughter!
But Eliezer goes to Aram at the service of his master without questioning.
When he arrives there he does an experiment which Chazal say was incorrect, for the first girl who would give him and the camels water could have been anyone. Now, the question is, if in fact it was incorrect, then why did Eliezer who was a very great man do it in this way?
The answer is that since he had a personal interest in Yitschok, he did not trust himself to be totally dedicated to the will of his master. Therefore the only way he could remove his will was by doing it the way he did.
And what was the result? There is a continuation to the midrash: after this episode he was no longer Orur but Baruch.
An amazing message: by submitting his will against his own desires, and instincts he was able to grow out of himself.
In the same way, to be an Eved HaShem is to submit ourselves to His Will and to accept His Will, even when it goes against all our instincts. That is how we are released from self-bondage.
A great moshol for this, from the White book:
There is a story of the man who fell off a cliff in the dark and on the way down grasped a branch and hung on for dear life. Weakening, he finally cried out to heaven, "Please help me!" and the answer came, "Let go!" "But if I let go I'll die," the man replied. "Let go!" was all he heard. When finally he could hold on no longer, he did let go, knowing it was the horrible end. To his great surprise, the ground was only a foot below him.
