Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah said: "Once a child outsmarted me." "I was traveling and I met a child at a crossroads. I asked him, 'Which is the way to the city?' and he replied, 'This way is short and long, and this way is long and short.'""
""I took the 'short and long' path. I quickly saw the city, but the entrance was obstructed by gardens and plantations. So I retraced my steps and said to the child, 'My son, didn't you tell me that this was the short path?' The child replied, 'Didn't I tell you that it is also long?' (Talmud Eiruvin 53b).
This story is the basis of the book Tanya, written by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi (1745-1813), founder of the Chabad Lubavitch Movement, whose release from prison in Tsarist Russia we celebrate this Sunday.
Now, there are many ways and lessons to be drawn from the story itself and the entire book, of course, but I think it is appropriate to think about something that certainly has relevance in our community, in La Plata.
There are two aspects to everything: the internal and the external. The internal is its very essence, its reason for being, the driving force of its existence, while the external aspect is its expression to others, its interface with the world, as if they were the necessary tools to achieve the realization of the internal aspect.
For example, when someone wants a house, that desire drives countless secondary actions necessary to achieve the goal, such as buying land, hiring an architect, deciding on plans, layout, quality of materials, and so on. Only when the house is finished and complete has the person's initial and deepest desire truly been fulfilled.
The same is true in a community. There is an internal and an external aspect. To reach the internal aspect, one must travel a long and a short path. Long in terms of effort, time, work, and other things, while short in terms of achieving the desired and initially sought results.
However, when you take the short and long paths, it seems like you'll reach satisfactory results quickly, without much investment of any kind. But in reality, it's a long road where you never reach the goal and get lost in "gardens and plantations.".
We must clearly and honestly consider what the objectives are and what the long and short paths are to take, what the truly important internal issues are and what the external, secondary and circumstantial, non-fundamental ones are.
In La Plata, there's talk of two schools, one meant to support the other, but nobody asks if what already exists could be improved... If the number of students has been decreasing for many years, are we on a short and long road?