Story: The polished Diamond

Retold by Rabbi Shlomo Price

When I was young and my Father disciplined me, he never said, ‘Why were you a bad boy?’ Rather he said, ‘It's beneath your dignity to do such a thing. You're too good for it.’

I run a rehabilitation program for people who were in prison for crime, alcohol, and drugs. We try to help them start their lives over. I was speaking to a number of inmates about this point.

“You're too good for this. You're too good for this kind of thing to happen to you.”

One fellow, named Avi, exclaimed, “What do you mean, I'm too good for this? How do you expect me to have any self esteem? I started stealing when I was 8. I'm now 34. I was in prison 8 times for a total of 16 years of my life. Nobody is going to hire me. Who's going to give me a job, are they crazy? My family doesn't want to see me. They wish I were dead!! How do you expect me to have self respect!!”

I told him, “Did you ever see an exhibit of beautiful jewellery? There was a necklace with a beautiful 20 carat diamond in the centre. It was worth 4 million dollars. Do you know what that diamond looked like when it came out of the mine? It was yucky - a dirty piece of glass. If the worker didn't know any better, he would have called it junk and thrown it away. Fortunately, there's a maven there who stops the worker.

‘That's not junk, there's a gem in there worth millions of dollars,’ he says. ‘Where is it?’ the worker exclaims. ‘Oh, it's in there somewhere,’ the maven responds.

They take this dirty piece of glass into the factory and process it. By the time they get finished you have a beautiful diamond. How did they put such beauty into a dirty piece of glass? What magic did they use? The answer is: there was no magic. The beauty was always there, but concealed by what's outside. What they did was process it and reveal the beauty that was concealed.

Avi, don't tell me what's inside of you, I know better.

Every morning we get up and say, “The soul that You gave me is pure...” You have a piece of HaShem inside of yourself. It's a beautiful gem. It just so happens, that your 16 years of prison have covered it up with layers of stuff so you can't see the beauty. We're going to help you process it and reveal the beauty of it. You and everybody else will see what's there.

Avi went through our program and got his act together. He got treatment, went to a halfway house, and eventually got a job in construction.

We were expanding the halfway house when Annette, the girl who works there, got a call. A family lost their mother and wanted to donate her furniture to the halfway house. All they needed was a van to come and pick it up. Annette called Avi and he said that he would get a truck and pick it up in two days.

When Avi got there, he told Annette that it wasn't worth it. Most of the furniture was broken, old and dilapidated. It was ready for the garbage. Annette told him that she didn't want to disappoint the family. She said to bring it and what we can salvage we will. The rest we can throw away.

He brought the stuff and started schlepping a couch up to the halfway house. Out of the couch falls an envelope with 5000 Shekalim.

You have to realize, Avi used to steal purses for 10 shekel or less. He's making now 100 shekel a day and trying to get his family together. Now here's 5000 shekel that nobody knows about. It's practically hefker.

Avi tells Annette about the money and she said to call the family. The family thanks Avi for telling them, but they donate it to the halfway house in their mother's memory.

When I met Avi afterwards, I told him, “Didn't I tell you we would find a diamond? I know many respectable people, who were never in prison, who would have kept the money if they were in your situation. For a guy who was in jail 8 times for stealing, to have made such a reversal, that he finds an envelope of money with no name and returns it - we've polished a diamond.”