Human Physics      

If your old elementary school still stands, try revisiting it as an adult, and watch how everything shrinks. The classrooms, corridors, sports field, school hall, cafeteria — the entire vast domain which you prowled as an eight-year-old — all seem reduced by the passage of years.

The Lilliputian effect applies to humans as well. The teachers who once towered over their fiefdoms will likely seem reduced in both size and authority.

That’s the law of human physics — as you grow up, everything else seems to grow down.

At a gathering of Gateshead Yeshiva alumni in Yerushalayim last week, I encountered the exception to that rule — and learned something valuable about the enduring nature of greatness.