When You do the Right Thing | Rabbi Nachman Seltzer

So I have a friend and he lives in Lakewood. He has a partner. For many years, they’ve been running a camp. It's very popular. So he told me, A few months after the camp is over, already I'm started to talk about the reunion with my partner, and one of the things we do at the reunion is that we give out a USB that has all the highlights of the summer. Color War, the Grand Scene, the cantata, the choirs and the races, you know, camp experience. We give it out. So I bought a few hundred of the USBs and I gave over the USBs to the person who transfers the content onto each USB. And then I got them back right before the reunion. And as I'm going through the USB, he tells me, I notice, for like a fraction of a second, that when we were at a waterpark, there's a staff member at the waterpark that's not completely Tznius. So now I felt, like, how could I give a USB that has even something that is a fraction of a second that's not right? What am I going to do? It's a lot of money. And plus the kids are waiting for it. They’re going to be very disappointed. I called my Rav, the camp Rav, I said: This is the situation. What do we do? So he says: Look, I can't tell you what you have to do over here, but I can tell you if you don't give it out, I have no question that you're going to see tremendous Siyata D’Shmaya in the future, because of this decision. So we decided not to give it out. When we got to the reunion, we had a great time and I told the kids: There's a technical problem, and we'll send it to you in the mail. So now I want to quote to you the numbers that he told me. We had to pay the duplicater $1.50 each, to reload the file. The cost for that came out to $487.50. We had to print another 50 copies because not everyone shows up to the reunion, but if I'm sending it out in the mail, everyone has to get a USB. That came to $175 for all of the mailing out and everything like that, all the extra copies. With the mailing, stuffing, envelopes, stamps, the whole cost came to $750. The next week, he tells me, my partner calls an ice skating rink because we're going to have a trip with the camp to an ice skating rink. Usually it costs $500 an hour for a camp to go to the ice skating rink, we’re talking six hours. So, of course, since we've gone to this ice skating rink before, my partner asked for a discount. He was going to suggest a discount, maybe we should pay $250 an hour. Then, in the end, he said, like: Why should I volunteer the number? Let's see what the man from the ice skating rink will say. The man from the ice skating rink said: Okay, you guys are returning customers, we like you. $125 an hour. Very interesting situation. $125 times six hours equals 750. The exact amount we had ‘lost’ by not giving out the USB to all the campers. Hashem wasn’t finished. Registration opens up. Normally, it takes time until we fill it. You know, a few months before camp. A week into registration, we’re completely full. Rabosai, this is what happens when we do the right thing. We're talking about life in our time, in our world, in our complicated world. And it's up to us to make the right decisions. What we look at, where we go, how we handle things, and what message we convey to our children about what's important and what's עיקר and what's טפל. And when we do the right thing, HaKadosh Baruch Hu has a way of showing us, You're doing the right thing. I'm proud of you. Keep up the good work.