Excerpts from Chana’s upcoming book
The Butterfly Effect – Everything Counts
How are we measured in Life?
How are we measured in Heaven?
What counts more:
How you speak to a cashier in the supermarket?
Or how you speak to the head of your child’s yeshiva?
How you take care of a stranger?
Or how you care for your own child?
What if they count equally?
Does it matter what we do?
The effect of one action!
Does it really matter what you do in every little thing?
It’s just one little thing and no one may ever know.
Could allowing another car into my lane on the turnpike affect the world?
Could waking up and saying a morning prayer affect my whole community?
The effect of our smile to a stranger,
to our child,
to our spouse,
to our friend!
The person driving who stops the car to let me cross the street.
That kindness makes me teary.
Do we know how far reaching an act of kindness goes?
And equally, an act that lacks kindness?
What is the effect of snubbing someone when they greet you?
Or of not responding to a “Good Shabbos”?
or to “Hello”?
What about leaving another out,
making her feel she doesn’t belong?
What is the effect of seeing a new face in a place of worship,
a place of work,
or someplace else,
and not greeting them
to make them feel welcome?
Every action, significant or insignificant has the potential to change the world.
The Butterfly Effect!
It was originally presented as a scientific paper to The New York Academy of Sciences, by Edward Lorenz in 1963.
According to the Butterfly Effect, every little thing we do can have enormous repercussions.
It states, in scientific terms, that when a butterfly flaps its wings, it moves molecules of air.
Those molecules move other molecules, which move others,
and those eventually have the potential to create great weather changes,
like a hurricane or a tornado on the other side of the world.
Scientists eventually proved that the same principal works with every form of moving matter, including people.
It was designated as a scientific law:
The Law of Sensitive Dependence upon Initial Conditions.
It is written that a five-year-old girl
tells her parents that her mother is destined to bear a son who will save Israel.
As a result, her father reunites with her mother and all of Israel does the same.
What Miriam, the sister of Moses, had said to her parents thousands of years ago, still greatly affects our lives today.
What if Moshe Rabbeinu (Moses, our teacher) had not been born?
How has his birth affected each of us,
as individuals and as a nation?
His birth affected the secular world as well.
The Butterfly Effect — one action insignificant in our minds has huge consequences.
Everything we do counts.
Everything matters.
How many of us reach out to get something without even giving it a thought or even remembering doing so?
The daughter of Pharaoh sees a baby floating in a basket.
Without thinking about who he is,
she instinctively reaches out her arm to bring the baby out of the water.
She sees he is a Hebrew and names him Moshe.
One reach, one momentary reaction to seeing a baby in a basket in the water.
The result of that one momentary action is that the Jews leave Egypt and eventually enter Israel.
The Torah is given.
The values and natural laws for the whole world change.
There are just too many effects of that one stretch of the arm to even imagine.
