Many of you receive this email via the services of my good friend, a nice Jewish boy by the name of Sergei Brin, one of the founding partners of Google and it's email sub company Gmail.
Alright, well we're not exactly great friends yet, but if he's interested in being friends with me I am definitely game from my side so we're 50% of the way there...
Either way, you may or may not have noticed but this week my friend Sergei's company's market value topped $220,000,000,000...and still counting.
Hailed as the fastest growing company in the history of the world, Google's success is based on two things.
1. Their unprecedented attraction is the clean and extensive response that one search entry produces (1,430,000 responses for a search on the word Chabad in 0.03 seconds).
2. Their unprecedented revenue is from the consumer based advertising. Every advertisment is directly linked to any single word in a search or email.
The common denominator?
They realize the amazing potential of every word.
And they have learned this from the Torah
This week we read of the first matchmaker.
Long before Yentl, the Chief of Avraham's Staff, 'Eliezer' embarked on a mission to find a wife for his master's child Yitzchok.
On reaching his destination he has an amazingly pointed experience of divine providence leading him to Rivka, the match for Yitzchok.
Then, when meeting the prospective in-laws, he repeats to them the entire story of his ordeal in detail of why he is sure that she is the one.
In recording this episode, the Torah records Eliezer's entire repetition to the in-laws almost verbatim of its description of how the story actually happened.
Why the need to repeat it (other than to tell us that in-laws deserve attention)?
Isn't the Torah written in the most cryptic and concise form never repeating even an extra letter?
Why the sudden freestyle?
The Talmud points out that this is an indication that "the spoken word of the master's servant is more beautiful than the Torah of the children."
In plain English; the simple words of Eliezer are more beautiful (and worthy of repetition) than the more concise words of the Torah that would be passed on to us "the children" of Avraham.
Now what's that supposed to mean? Simple words of a servant in discussion with a bunch of crooks are more beautiful than Torah?
Perhaps though, the sages were teaching us what Google is showing us, only two thousand years later - the power of the spoken word.
You see, the Torah and the Mitzvot were given to us as tools to change the world.
But the actual change happens through the spoken word; those simple every day experiences that aren't necessarily a part of our conscious effort to be doing the right thing.
It's the simple words, those seemingly insignificant experiences we go through every day, thousands of times a day, with every single word we utter, with every single thought we explore, with every single action we do, that's how we change the world.
Torah and Mitzvos are the tools to change.
The simple "words" in our life are the true beauty of how we use those tools.
Every single word.
Enter it in your PC search bar and it can elicit 6 billion responses on Google.
Enter it as a positive experience in your life and it will change 6 billion lives around the world for the better.
Many thanks to the folks over at Lubavitch of Finland and South Africa for their assistance in developing this thought.
Wishing you a Shabbat of appreciating every "word" in your life.
CEM wrote...