When I was a girl I remember hearing a beautiful story told by Rabbi Yehoshua Rosenfeld from Bogota,Colombia and it has stuck with me ever since.
There was once a King who had a son and he wanted to test the prince to see if he would be able to succeed him, so he sent him away to a far away island where it was told contained so many diamonds that the people there didn’t know what to do with them. So the mission of this prince was to collect as many diamonds as the ship could contain and return home.
When the prince arrived to the island he couldn’t believe his eyes. When he tried purchasing some food and paying with diamonds the locals couldn’t stop laughing. “Diamonds are not precious to us at all, they are meaningless here. What is worthy here are rotten fish.”
So the Prince began his quest for the rotten fish and forgot all about the diamonds. He loaded the ship with rotten fish instead of diamonds and went back home. When he was close the people of the Kingdom could smell the rotten fish, you can imagine the Kings frustration when the prince arrived and told him he found something much more valuable than the diamonds.
This beautiful allegory explains: the King is H”S and we are the prince. G-d sends us down into this world to elevate it with our actions, but we get mesmerized by the material and we forget what really matters and our mission. When we return our souls to H”S after a long life we come back with rotten fish instead of the diamonds.
The only thing we own is what we give let’s never forget that.
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