Today I would like to talk to you about my father. My father Yidel Leib Muszkal, may his memory be a blessing, had the largest collection of Jewish stories. For every situation, he had a story. His stories were funny, wise, earthy, perceptive, colorful, universal. He told them in a juicy Yiddish. And he laughed harder than anyone listening to him. I can still hear him laughing.
He used to teach about life with many Jewish sayings like:
“A wise man hears one word and understands two”.
Or: “A hero is someone who can keep his mouth shut when he is right”.
Or: “What you don’t see with your eyes, don’t invent with your mouth”.
A story my father loved to tell was the story of Mr. Goldberg the tailor. In that one story he gave a whole life lesson. It is the Yiddish version for the proverb:
“We don’t have to stay in the same box we were shipped in”.
The story of Mr. Goldberg the tailor is an invitation to step out of the box, to step out of the “survival suit”. It is an invitation to become aware of the hardening of our attitudes, and to invite our graceful, free essence to play with life. It is an invitation to live life at its fullest.
Watch the story of Mr. Goldberg the tailor as it is being told in the TED talk I presented at the Tel Aviv TEDx conference in April 2009. At the heart of this story is the fundamental principle that I teach couples: step out of the “survival suit” together and step into a creative, flexible new dance.