I have a story to tell you. A fable, if you will, about a monastery that had fallen upon hard times.
Once it had been a great order. However, as a result of waves of anti-monastic persecution during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the rise of secularism in the nineteenth and twentieth, all of its branch houses were lost, and its ranks became so decimated that only five monks remained in the now decaying mother house: the abbot and four others. All of them were in their 80s, and clearly it was only a matter of time before the order would die out.
In the deep woods that surrounded the monastery there was a little hut that a rabbi from a nearby town would occasionally use for a hermitage. Through their many years of prayer and contemplation the elderly monks had become a bit psychic, so they could somehow always sense when the rabbi was in his hermitage. “The rabbi is in the woods, the rabbi is in the woods again,” they would whisper to one another.
At one such time, as the abbot agonized over the imminent death of his order, it occurred to him to go visit the hermitage. And ask the rabbi if by some possible chance he could offer any advice that might save the monastery...(read more)
