Poor Man’s Parable

Long ago in these pages, I wrote about a certain propensity of mine: “My mind is perpetually set on mashal-sensing mode, and with no discernible way to reset it, either. Everything I see and hear is at risk for being perceived in my mind as a rich, juicy parable for some deep truth about life and Torah.” I forthrightly acknowledged then that the tendency might be traceable “to early, sustained exposure to Shabbos afternoon Pirchei groups, or some other long-forgotten traumatic experience.”

Back then, I observed that not everyone shared my enthusiasm for mining profound meaning in things like, say, the then-relatively new invention called the GPS. Still, I wrote, I continued to have “a captive audience for my mind’s metaphorical meanderings: Me.”

But these many years later, I can honestly say that I’ve moved on, gotten over the reflexive framing of things I see and hear and read as springboards for moral and spiritual lessons. No more propounding of parables for me.

Well, almost.

An alcoholic has got to maintain a lifelong awareness of his weakness that yet lurks somewhere in the recesses of his personality and stay away from that first drink, lest it lead to a second and from there, who knows? And given the right “bottle of wine,” I, too, can be all too easily drawn right back into the maelstrom of manufacturing meshalim.