A 31-year-old French-Tunisian truck driver was able to murder 84 innocent lives, wound over 100 and plunge the world into havoc. A once picturesque, peaceful beachfront was tragically transformed into a battlefield. The bloody carnage left millions and millions of people around the globe totally stunned, and in a state of sheer shock. How could one individual possibly do so much evil and damage?
One tragic event has left so many orphans, so many broken hearts and shattered dreams. Lives that should have been lived out to their maximum potential have been torn away, never to return. The tears shed seem to match the water in the French Riviera. Crowds of revelers were there to watch fireworks and instead witnessed brutality in its ugliest form.
Although the pain and trauma is ever so real, our tradition teaches us to honor those victims by becoming their living ambassadors in this world. If the ripples of evil are so potent, how much more so can one mitzvah, positive action, produce everlasting effects? By doing one seemingly simple good deed, we span oceans and continents, binding all of humanity into one strong unit.
Maimonides in Mishneh Torah (Teshuva, 3:4.), describes the state of the world as being in perfect balance. “Each person must view himself and the entire world as being half meritorious and half guilty. If he does a single mitzvah, he can tip the scale and bring redemption and salvation to the entire world.” Just like every business is focused on each and every sale, so too Judaism places an incredible emphasis on every single act of goodness and kindness. Every sale brings the success of a profit more pronounced and so too every mitzvah performed around the world, helps stabilize our universe.
A scientific theory known as Chaos Theory, says that a butterfly can flap its wings on one side of the world and cause a series of conditions producing a storm at another remote location. Although our universe seems so dauntingly large, we are all interconnected. Just as distance cannot impede the indivisibility of the universe, so too all of goodness is interconnected and when we do just one simple act of goodness, wherever we may be, it will help heal broken hearts and bring redemption to our world.
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