Poem 35 (With Introductory Story)

Long ago there was a field owned by two brothers. One of them had a wife and children while the other had no wife and children. During one wheat harvest they bound up shocks in the field and beat out the ears and made two equal piles of the grain they had reaped, one pile for each of them; and they left them there in the field. 

That night the brother who had neither wife nor children lay in his bed and thought to himself: “I am all by myself and have nobody who is dependent on me for his daily bread. But my brother has a wife and children, so why should my portion be like his?” So he rose in the middle of the night and stole like a thief and took sheaves from his own pile and placed them on his brother’s pile. 

And his brother said to his wife: “It is not fair to divide the corn in the field into two portions, half to me and half to my brother. My lot and fate is so much better than his, since God has given me a wife and children while he goes alone and has no pleasure or song or delight in anything but the grain he gathers in the field. Come with me, wife, and we shall secretly add to his portion from our own.” And they did so.

The next morning both brothers saw that their piles were still the same size and this kept repeating itself for a few days. Finally both brothers staked out the piles and realized that both were giving to the other brother, they embraced and kissed.

That was the place that the Lord desired, the spot where the two brothers had thought good thoughts and done good deeds. That was why it it is on this spot that the Beit HaMikdash was built. 

(Adapted from Bin Gurion I, 491-2; Bin Gurion II, 272-3, as discovered in and discussed on the blog Menachem Mendel, by Michael Pitkowsky - http://menachemmendel.net/blog/two-brothers-a-field-and-the-temple/)

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Mordechai Meir

If the holy Temple

depended on us and our

brotherly love - I wonder

if they ever would have built

more than half of it