Always A Benefit to Study

For those of us who get discouraged when we forget much of what we study, the following story is told by Rabbi Nathaniel Bushwick,

“It is related that a king once gave his servants buckets and instructed them to draw water from the well. When they began, they noticed that the buckets had many holes and that the water leaked out by the time the buckets were drawn to the top of the well. They stopped. When the king later asked them if they had done as he had told them, they replied that they had stopped because of the holes. ‘You should have continued,’ the king said. ‘I didn’t ask you to draw water because I wanted the water, but because I wanted the buckets cleaned.’ So it is with Torah. The substance of what one has studied may later be forgotten, but the process of studying is itself purifying."

Here is one more saying I recently read that comes from Rabbi Israel Salanter (1810-1883),

"Normally, we worry about our own material well-being and our neighbor's soul; let us rather worry about our neighbor's material well-being and our own souls."

(Scott)