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any of us have seen family portraits with Bubby and Zeidy in the center surrounded by their children grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Sometimes there are so many people in the picture it’s hard to imagine that all of them descended from just one couple. A guest who joined our Shabbos seudah recently told us that his grandmother passed away a few years ago leaving 2 500 descendants. (Yes you read it correctly. That’s two thousand five hundred descendants!!) What a family picture that would have been!
Just think about it. A woman gives birth to many children. With each child she endures a long pregnancy and then suffers through labor pains. She wakes up multiple times a night to feed and care for each infant. She devotes herself to raising her children taking care of their physical and emotional needs providing for their chinuch cooking cleaning shopping chauffeuring doing homework with them and more — perhaps while also working to help support her family. Oftentimes it feels overwhelming and unmanageable.
Fast forward to the time when all the children are grown and have children of their own. The pain that the mother went through to give birth to her children and the efforts she expended to care for them have borne fruit. She no longer has to go through pregnancy and labor pains yet the grandchildren keep coming. If she’s blessed with a long life and if her children are blessed with large families then with relatively little effort on her part she can enjoy the tremendous nachas that comes along with generations of descendants.
As we know everything in the physical world has a parallel in the ruchniyus world.
