The Fire Alarm
Mendel—a fellow with a good heart, if not the sharpest pencil in the case—came from a remote village, one of those forgotten shtetls so small that even cartographers sometimes forgot to mark it on the map. When Mendel announced his intention to visit the nearest big city, his neighbors reacted as though he’d proposed a journey to the moon.
Mendel was captivated by all the new things he encountered in the city. But in the dead of night, he was jolted awake by a loud, wailing siren. “What is that noise?” he asked, wide-eyed with fear. His host explained, “That’s a fire alarm—it warns the people and calls the firemen.”
When Mendel returned to his village, he eagerly told his neighbors everything he had seen in the big city. But what excited him most was their system for dealing with fires. “Whenever there’s a fire,” he explained, “they sound an alarm, and the fire is quickly extinguished.”
The village mayor, impressed by this, thought it was a brilliant idea. He immediately purchased an alarm. Sure enough, a few days later, a fire broke out, and the new alarm was sounded. The villagers proudly gathered to hear the alarm echo through the streets.
Meanwhile, half the village burned to the ground.
A passing traveler watched the scene unfold, unable to stifle his laughter. “Fools! Don’t you know you can’t extinguish a fire just by sounding an alarm? The alarm is only meant to call the fire brigade to put out the fire. The alarm's wailing won’t frighten the flames into running away!”
No Magic
In many ways, we do the same thing with the High Holidays. We think that blowing the shofar and reciting the prayers are some sort of magic formula. By simply going through the motions, we believe we can ward off the consequences of our mistakes and misdeeds.
In truth, the shofar and the prayers are like a fire alarm. They’re meant to wake us up to real teshuvah— to stir us to action, to improve ourselves. Only then can we extinguish the flames of vices and bad habits and put out the negative impulses that burn within us.
