Ripple Effects | Rabbi YY Jacobson

My brother, Rabbi Simon Jacobson, author of Towards a Meaningful Life and many other books, shared with me an email that he received a few days ago. A man writes to him the following. Dear Rabbi Jacobson, I'm a musician who lives in upstate New York. I usually play secular rock music. I was invited to do a concert in a bar in Poughkeepsie, New York. This was Thursday night. Everybody knows that Friday morning, around 3 a.m., Israel began its surprise attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. That was early evening by us. So as I am doing my concert in this bar in Poughkeepsie, we hear the news that Israel has just attacked Iran. Even though I looked around and it didn't seem like anybody was Jewish, I still felt compelled to talk about it. So during my performance, I announced what was happening and I asked that everyone should pray for peace in their own way, and make a commitment to do an act of kindness, to help make the world a better place. The next night, Friday night, I have a very strange dream. A man comes to me in the dream. His name is Rabbi Leibel Groner. The late Rabbi Leibel Groner was the personal secretary of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. And he says to me, in the dream, The Rebbe asked me to call you and thank you for what you did last night when the war began, in the bar in Poughkeepsie. As a result of your announcement, there was a Jewish woman who decided that Friday evening before Shabbat to light Shabbos candles, and her Mitzvah of lighting Shabbos candles helped the Israeli air force to be successful in Iran, it helped protect the people of Israel, and it helped bring down more Divine blessings into the world. So the Rebbe says thank you. I woke up in the morning, remembering the dream vividly, and I think to myself, Okay, it's a nice dream, it's a pleasant dream, but, of course, it's nonsense. The man continues his email to my brother and he says, On Sunday, I receive an email from a woman. She searched my name in social media and she found my email address. And this is what she writes to me, I was in the bar in Poughkeepsie when you did your performance. I was inspired and I decided that day to light Shabbat candles. I haven't lit Shabbos candles in 50 years, since my Bat Mitzvah, but I did light it that day because of your words. We look at the world from a very external perspective. We don't see the power of a Mitzvah. But when you have that deeper perspective, when you appreciate that we are all part of one organism, really, that the entire planet, as the Medrash says, is a גוף גדול, it's one large superorganism, it's the body of Hashem's presence, and all of us are part, we're all limbs in that large גוף גדול, and, therefore, we're all integrated and we're all interconnected, and what I do and what I don't do has a direct impact, visible or invisible, in ways that we know, and much more, in ways that we don't know. One woman lighting Shabbos candles, one man putting on Tefillin, holding back, abstaining from something immoral and destructive has a ripple effect on the entire body, on the entire planet, on the entire world.