The legend of the plates:
The gift that keeps on giving.
This is a true story that began a few years ago.
Two of our kids were newly married and living in the same city.
A dear friend of the family was living in that city as well and had sold her condo and was preparing to move.
She invited my daughter and daughter in law to come and see if they wanted any of the items she was not planning to take to her new home.
The girls really didn’t want any of the things but they didn’t want to hurt her feelings so they each took one item.
Our daughter in law took a picture frame and our daughter took one of those classic Israeli plates that you see in every kitschy gift shop in Jerusalem.
My daughter really didn’t want that plate.
But she was loathe to throw it away, because it was a gift.
So she baked cinnamon buns, arranged them daintily on the plate and sent them to her sister in law as a treat.
Her sister in law is no fool.
She knew the motive was “passing the plate”.
And so began a years long career of sending that plate back and forth in the sneakiest of manners.
It was the gift that never stopped giving.
When one of the couples moved the leave taking was emotional and dramatic.
It was all a distraction.
When the couple in transit arrived at their new home they were shocked to find amongst their belongings, you guessed it, the dish. It had been secreted amongst their belongings only to be found months later when they completed unpacking.
The saga continued.
The next maneuver happened when the newly arrived couple hosted their siblings for a weekend. At the end of the visit, the homeowners went down to the basement and found they had been left a gift. Not one, but two dishes hanging on the wall of the playroom.
This was war and the sorties continued.
When the next interaction between the two couples occurred, the retaliatory event manifested itself by dishes being left behind and discovered after the guilty parties had left.
You read correctly. The dish multiplied as a few miniatures were added to the equation.
The dishes were multiplying and the game of gifts continued apace.
As I said it was the gift that kept on giving and the hilarity it created and the ingenuity it engendered was a delight.
This continued for a number of years. Right now the dish(es) have gone missing, and we are waiting for their reappearance when we least expect them!

This week’s Torah portion is Re’eh and it contains many commandments.
The previous portions reviewed the history and the lessons we are to learn from our past, and now, Moshe talks about the society which the Jewish people will create in the Land of Israel.
Moshe addressed the principles and the values which are to support our life in the Land and these teachings are explained through the commandments that are instructive to that society.
The life we live in the Land will be based on fairness, generosity and justice.
“If anyone is poor among your fellow Israelites in any of the towns of the land the Lord is giving you (in the Land of Israel), do not be hard hearted or tight fisted toward them. Rather, be open handed and freely lend them whatever they need.”
There is a story in the Talmud of a Sage who would anonymously leave coins at the home of a pauper. The pauper was curious to know who was taking such good care of him, so he hid to catch the donor in the act. That particular day, the Sage was accompanied by his wife. After they deposited the coins they sensed they were being followed so they ran away. In their desperation to spare the pauper embarrassment, they jumped into a full sized oven to hide. The Sage’s feet started to burn from the heat. He noticed that his wife was not suffering any discomfort. She even told him to stand on her feet to save him from being further burned. The Sage wondered why his wife merited such a miracle when it was in fact he, who delivered the charity. She explained to him that she too does charity and hers is more immediate because she provides food for the poor which they can immediately consume, while he gives them money which they need to make the effort to use to buy food. So it seems she had achieved a higher level of loving kindness which resulted in a greater miracle. (Both of them were protected from being burned in the hot oven, her protection was more pervasive.
The Talmud then asks, why did the Sage and his wife have to go run and hide in a hot oven in the first place.
And the Talmud replies
“Because a person should let themselves get thrown into a burning furnace rather than put another person to shame.”
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks explains, poverty in Judaism is not just a physical lack, it has a psychological component.
Being poor is humiliating.
“It robs people of dignity. It makes them dependent on others-thus depriving them of independence which the Torah sees as essential to self-respect.”
The Torah is teaching us that not only do we need to provide for those in need we have to take extreme measures to provide for those needs in a way that will preserve the dignity of the recipient.
This is the type of sensitivity that is meant to be the bedrock of our society.
The portion takes it a step further. The portion concludes with a verse that says that when the population will travel to the holy Temple three times a year for the holidays of Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot,
“They shall not appear before Hashem empty handed, everyone according to what he can give, according to the blessing that Hashem, your Gd, gives you”.
The Sages teach us that there is a formula for the amount of gifts what is to bring to the Temple. If a person has a great deal of capacity and not many dependents they will give more. If however they have many that are relying on them for sustenance, then their gift will be less.
The words that are used to explain the capacity that a person has is translated to read
“the gifts of His hand”. It really should read that a person should give as much as the gifts of your hand, what you have to give.
It’s a strange switch of the grammar.
The Kli Yakar, 16th century Torah commentator teaches that the usage of the Hebrew word to denote “his” instead of “yours” is intentional.
It’s the gifts that are His, the ones given to us from Above.
If we are mindful of the fact that all we have is a gift from Above, we will know we are only the guardian of those gifts, entrusted to do the right thing.
Then it is the gift that keeps on giving, freely handed by us to the one who needs it.
In Hebrew the word for giving is a palindrome NATAN. Because when you give, you are really receiving. It goes back and forth between the donor and the recipient, each receiving something from the interaction.
I’m not sure who is going to pull the next prank with those plates. It’s gotten harder because they have multiplied.
But I know that the love engendered by the gift that goes to and fro is worth its weight in gold.
Today is day 328.
May we be blessed to give the ultimate gift of freedom to our precious brethren in captivity.
Shabbat Shalom and so much love!