When Avraham Avinu looked around and saw G-d’s divine goodness at work he realized he had to play a key role in the symphony of chesed creating relationships between people on an infrastructure of benevolent giving
“The seeds of a certain type of violet that grows in North America are propagated in two phases. First the seeds are shot out of the plant stem as from a cannon and are scattered around the plant. Then ants come along find the seeds and carry them to their nest. On the outer layer of the seeds are corpuscles that contain a nutritious oil that ants find particularly palatable. Once the ants have nibbled these corpuscles away they have no more use for the seeds so they remove them from their nest and leave them scattered on the ground nearby. Under suitable conditions these seeds will sprout within a very short time.
“The most interesting fact here is that seeds that haven’t been nibbled by ants will take a longer time to sprout or they might never sprout at all.
“It turns out that when the ants consume the food cells they also chew away some of the hard shell surrounding the seed making it easy for water to penetrate the seed and sprout the germ within it which now has no difficulty breaking out of the shell” (Nitzotzot Magazine).
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