What if the gold is already in your hands, but it is more comfortable to feel helpless?

Sometimes we are convinced that our main problem is what we do not have. But an even greater danger is allowing what is missing to take over the whole picture. The cobbler in the story did not actually receive gold. He received a reason to stop seeing himself as a man with no options. His skill, profession and hands were already there. The bar did not create them; it released them from despair. King Solomon describes the lazy person who says, “There is a lion in the road” (Proverbs 26:13). Sometimes we are not looking for a solution to a problem; we are looking for a problem that will explain why we do not have to seek a solution. Ecclesiastes adds, “He who watches the wind will not sow” (Ecclesiastes 11:4). Pain can be real and injury can be real, but one question remains ours alone: what do I do now with what I have?

What “lion in the street” have you been telling yourself about for years to explain why you cannot move forward, and what is one step you can take today even while the lion is still there?

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What if the gold is already in your hands, but it is more comfortable to feel helpless?

A story is told about Yossele, the wealthy man of the town, who brought his shoes to the local cobbler for repair. The next day he returned to pick them up and could hardly believe his eyes. The nails were sticking out, the sole had been cut crookedly, and glue was smeared everywhere. “What did you do to my shoes?” he asked painfully.

The cobbler lowered his head. For a moment he tried to answer, but the words became stuck in his throat. Finally he burst into tears. “Yossele, look at the shoes and you will see my life. My eyes no longer see what my hands are doing. There is no livelihood, my wife is ill, the children are hungry, my daughters are getting older and I have no means to marry them off. I sit here all day, but my mind is not in the workshop at all. I wake up in the morning already knowing that nothing good is waiting for me.”

Yossele was silent. Then he said, “Wait here a moment.”

A short while later he returned holding what looked like a heavy, impressive bar of gold. He placed it in the cobbler’s hands and said, “Take it. This is your piece of security. Put it on a shelf at home, and every morning look at it and remember that all is not lost. If one day you truly reach the point of having no bread, cut off a small piece, sell it, and get through the difficult period.”

The cobbler held the bar in both hands as though he were holding his new life.

And at that moment something remarkable happened. Nothing in his bank account changed. His wife was still ill. The debts remained. The children were still hungry. The workshop was the same workshop, the tools were the same tools, and the hands were the same hands. But something changed in his mind. Suddenly he was no longer a man who had nothing. I have backing, he thought. I have a way out. If everything collapses, I have gold.

The next morning he sat down at his workbench, and the hands that despair had paralyzed began to remember what they knew. The talent had always been there. He was a cobbler, the son of a cobbler. He knew how to cut, stitch, glue and repair. But despair had covered the talent. When a person is convinced that he has no chance, even the strengths he possesses begin to look meaningless.

He began to work differently. Every pair of shoes passed through his hands with care. One customer told another, a friend brought a neighbor, and the word spread. The small booth could no longer hold the crowds coming in. He rented the neighboring shop, began selling new shoes, entered a partnership in manufacturing, and gradually became a prosperous man himself.

Years passed.

One evening he was walking down the street when he saw a peddler sitting at the roadside. His eyes were extinguished. The cobbler approached and asked how he was doing, and the peddler began to tell him: no luck, no livelihood, a sick wife, hungry children, and everything he tried fell apart in his hands.

The cobbler froze. He heard himself. The same voice, the same words, the same man he had once been.

“Wait here a moment,” he said.

He ran home, took down the same gold bar he had kept on the shelf all those years, returned to the peddler and placed it in his hands. “Take it. Put it in your house. Every morning look at it and remember that all is not lost. If you truly reach the point of having no bread, cut off a small piece, sell it, and keep going.”

The peddler took the bar, but unlike the cobbler, something else began to work inside him: suspicion. Who gives a stranger wealth like this? Where is the trick? Surely someone is fooling me.

That very evening he took a tool and cut into the bar. Then he discovered the truth. Beneath a thin coating of gold was clay.

He ran angrily to the cobbler. “You deceived me! This is not gold at all!”

The cobbler looked at him for a long moment and said quietly: “Do you know the difference between us? I believed I had gold, and that piece of clay made me get up and work until my life turned into gold. You received exactly the same clay, but the first thing you did was break it open to prove that it was worth nothing.”

Then he added: “Your problem is not that the bar is made of clay. Your problem is that you are busy discovering why you have no chance instead of asking what you can do with the chance you already have.”

This is no longer a story about a cobbler. It is a story about human nature.

We know very well all the theories about gratitude, faith, positive thinking and focusing on what we have. Most of us can even give excellent advice to other people. And yet, when we ourselves enter a difficult period, something in consciousness changes direction. The human mind really does tend to give greater weight to what is dangerous, lacking, threatening or broken. Psychology calls this negativity bias. There is an evolutionary logic to it: what works does not demand immediate attention; what is broken does.

If five air conditioners in a house are working and one breaks down in the middle of the summer, no one walks around saying in amazement, “Thank God, five air conditioners are working beautifully.” Everyone talks about the broken one, and rightly so. It is hot, it is disruptive, and it needs repair.

The problem begins when one broken air conditioner becomes the conclusion: “Nothing in this house works.”

We do the same thing to ourselves. One deal collapses, and the conclusion becomes that nothing ever works out. One relationship becomes complicated, and the conclusion becomes that people cannot be trusted. One child is going through a difficult period, and a parent says: I failed as a parent. One year was hard, and a person declares: my life is ruined. One thing is missing, and it is given permission to erase ninety things that still exist.

Parashat Haazinu knows this danger well: “Yeshurun grew fat and kicked… and abandoned the God who made him” (Deuteronomy 32:15). A person’s problem is not always that he has nothing. Sometimes the problem is that he has so much that he no longer sees what he has. The Torah warns similarly: “Lest you eat and be satisfied… and your heart become proud, and you forget the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 8:12-14). Abundance itself can become invisible background. What exists becomes obvious; what is missing occupies the entire screen.

But now we have to go one step further, and it is less comfortable. We do not always merely fall into negativity bias. Sometimes we also benefit from it.

Sometimes complaining feels good.

Not because suffering is enjoyable, and not because a person truly wants life to be bad, but because there is something very comfortable about a story in which I am the unfortunate one. As long as I am the victim, I am exempt from the most disturbing question: what can I do now?

If everyone else is responsible for what happened to me, I do not have to examine my part. If I have no luck, I do not have to change my habits. If “this is just who I am,” I am exempt from working on my character. If “no one ever gave me a chance,” I do not have to ask what I did with the chances I did receive. If “this generation is impossible,” I do not have to examine how I educate. If “my wife never understands me,” I do not have to ask when I last tried to understand her.

Victimhood can become a shelter. It gives a person a hidden exemption from responsibility.

King Solomon describes this mechanism almost chillingly: “The lazy man says, ‘There is a lion in the road, a lion among the streets’” (Proverbs 26:13). The lazy man does not say, “I do not feel like going out.” He says, “I would love to go out, but what can I do? There is a lion outside.” Suddenly laziness becomes responsibility. In fact, he sounds thoughtful and cautious. A responsible person does not go outside when a lion is roaming the streets. Metzudat David explains that the lazy person magnifies the danger because of his laziness. In other words, when a person does not want to act, the mind knows how to manufacture excellent reasons why action is impossible.

This says something enormous about human nature: sometimes we are not looking for a solution to the problem. We are looking for a problem that will justify why we do not have to look for a solution.

The “lion” does not have to be completely imaginary. Sometimes it really is hard. Perhaps you really were hurt. Perhaps you really did begin from a worse starting point. Perhaps you really have less money. Perhaps you really did not receive the tools others received. Perhaps you really fell. But the question is what you do with that fact. Is it a condition inside which you must build your next step, or has it become the explanation for why nothing more is expected of you?

Ecclesiastes adds an equally sharp sentence: “He who watches the wind will not sow, and he who looks at the clouds will not reap” (Ecclesiastes 11:4). Whoever waits for perfect wind will never sow. Whoever keeps watching the clouds will never harvest. Some people wait for life to become orderly before they begin to live. When work calms down, I will learn. When the children grow up, I will invest in my marriage. When the pressure eases, I will pray properly. When I feel confident, I will take the step. When I am no longer afraid, I will change. When I have time, I will do what matters.

But perhaps this is one of the greatest deceptions we sell ourselves: that real life will begin after life stops getting in the way.

It will not.

There will always be wind. There will always be clouds. Something will always be imperfect. Whoever waits for a world without interruptions before sowing may discover at the end that he has no crop.

Rabbi Tarfon cuts through the entire system of excuses with one sentence: “It is not your duty to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it” (Mishnah, Avot 2:16). You were not asked to solve everything. You were not asked to repair your entire personality today. You were not asked to know with certainty that you will succeed. But neither are you free to do nothing. Precisely because you are not required to finish everything, the size of the task is no longer an excuse not to begin anything.

And there is another verse, perhaps the sharpest of all: “A person’s folly distorts his way, and his heart rages against the Lord” (Proverbs 19:3). A person twists his own path, and then his heart becomes angry with God.

What a disturbing verse. A person makes decisions, repeats habits, postpones, rationalizes, ignores warnings, and then when the result comes he asks: “Why is this happening to me?”

Sometimes that question is completely justified. There are things that happen to a person that have nothing to do with his choices. But sometimes we should dare to ask another question: did everything happen to me, or are there things toward which I also led myself?

Ramchal, in Mesillat Yesharim, when discussing zerizut, diligence and alacrity, describes laziness not merely as lack of physical energy but as heaviness that produces delays and excuses and prevents a person from beginning the right action at the right time (Mesillat Yesharim, chapter 6). This is important: many times a person is not standing before a wall. He is standing before himself while explaining that the wall is the problem.

This is the great difference between pain and victimhood. A person in pain says: this is difficult for me, I need help. A person trapped in victimhood says: this is difficult for me, therefore nothing can be done. Pain says: I was hurt. Victimhood says: I was hurt, therefore from now on all my responsibility is canceled. Pain can lead a person to therapy, prayer, conversation and change. Victimhood can give him the perfect reason to remain exactly where he is.

The pain is real. But the excuse can become a choice.

And this is where the story of the clay bar becomes so powerful. The cobbler did not receive gold. He received belief that he still had an option. What happened because of that? He began to use things he already had. The hands were already there. The profession was already there. The talent was already there. The experience was already there. The ability to work was already there. The bar did not put any new ability inside him. It simply pulled him out of the consciousness that said: it is over.

The peddler, by contrast, received exactly the same bar, but his first search was for why it was worthless. Two people, the same clay. One asked: what can I do from here? The other asked: how can I prove that there is really nothing here?

And perhaps this is one of the greatest questions we need to ask ourselves during the Ten Days of Repentance. Not only: what am I missing? But: what do I already have that I have stopped seeing because I spend all day looking at what I do not have?

There is a person who asks God for livelihood while holding a profession he refuses to develop. There is a person who asks for peace at home but refuses to surrender the need to win every argument. There is a parent who asks for a relationship with his children while the phone receives more of his evening than they do. There is a person who asks to grow in Torah but refuses to set aside twenty minutes a day. There is someone who asks God to change his life on one condition: that he himself not have to change.

And here is the sharp point: sometimes a person does not need another gift from Heaven. He needs to stop using what he lacks as an excuse not to use what Heaven has already given him.

Not everything depends on us. There are illnesses we do not choose. There are tragedies. There are injuries and losses. There are situations in which a person genuinely needs help, treatment, kindness and support. Responsibility must never become a tool for blaming someone who is suffering. But neither may we take the fact that we do not control everything in life and conclude that we are responsible for nothing.

We do not control everything that happens to us, but almost always one question remains: what do I do now with what happened?

Victimhood is afraid of that question, because the moment I ask, “What do I do now?” I am no longer only a character in a story someone else wrote. I become a participant again.

I may not have chosen the cards, but I still have something to do with the hand I was dealt.

Perhaps this is the deepest practical meaning of Hillel’s words: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And when I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” (Mishnah, Avot 1:14). On the one hand, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” There is a part no one in the world can do in my place. On the other hand, “When I am only for myself, what am I?” I am not all-powerful. I need other people and I need help from Heaven. But then comes the line that leaves no room to escape: “If not now, when?”

Not when all the problems are solved. Not when there are no lions in the street. Not when the wind stops blowing. Now. With what exists. From the place where I am.

Perhaps this is the kind of soul-searching we prefer not to do before Yom Kippur. It is easier to ask forgiveness for what we did than to ask where we built an entire system of explanations for why we cannot act differently. It is easier to say, “I have been through a lot,” than to ask whether at some point I turned what I went through into a license to remain where I am. It is easier to say, “This is my life,” than to ask: is this really all my life allows, or is this the story I have become used to telling about it?

Perhaps you were hurt. Perhaps you did not receive what others received. Perhaps life placed you behind. All of that may be true. But there is another truth: you are still here. You have another morning, another choice, another word that can be said differently, another conversation that can be held, another apology that can be made, another habit that can begin to change, another page that can be studied, another person who can be embraced, another attempt.

And perhaps we are holding all these things in our hands while saying: “I have nothing.”

That is not only sad. It is dangerous. Because the moment a person becomes convinced he has nothing is the moment he stops using what he has.

In the end, the cobbler was not saved by the gold. The gold was not gold. He was saved because, for the first time in years, he stopped seeing himself as a man who had nothing to do. The peddler did the opposite. He received an opportunity and immediately began to dismantle it in order to discover why it was not really an opportunity.

There is a person who receives little and says: from here I begin. There is another who receives much and says: it is not enough. There is a person who sees a problem and looks for a step, and another who sees a problem and looks for an explanation for why no step exists.

There is a moment when a person must stop saying only, “Look what they did to me,” and add another sentence: “And now, what am I going to do?”

That is the moment the victim begins to become a choosing person again. That is the moment clay can begin to turn into gold, not because the material changed, but because the person holding it changed.

A Moment to Take With You

What “lion in the street” have you been telling yourself about for years to explain why you cannot move forward, and what is one step you can take today even while the lion is still there?