Pin the tail on the donkey

My friend threw a birthday party for his 3 year old daughter. We went to the party. 3 three year olds, 3 children 1 or under and 6 parents. no clowns, no live band, just people who wanted to share a happy moment together in a warm quiet corner of an often cold and confusing world. The moms read books and played some games with the kids. The fathers discussed life and shared their outlooks on different things with eachother. How to raise emotionally healthy kids, how to remain normal and emotionally healthy ourselves, getting closer to Hashem in a healthy way. the usual birthday party banter. of course a little Bills-Jets trashtalking was thrown in for good measure. The jets are my team unfortunately. We argued over who has it worse. The kids had a blast. the greatest party in their young lives. The thing is, all day i was telling my son, Noam Elimelech that we were going to a birthday party for his best friend Michal. I kept telling him how great it was gonna be. How much i was looking forward to it and how it was gonna be great to be all together with good friends. Naturally, he got excited. There was a simplicity in the joy at this get-together. It was people who were happy to be together. Who felt blessed to have such support and love. For me, i learned a deep lesson from the children. Children are able to teach us what our developed "adult" sense of selves will not allow us to be taught. This is one of the miracles of having children. My Rebbe, Rav Moshe Weinberger says that when we give our kids gelt on chanuka we are saying to them, " all year i clothe you and feed you and teach you and hug you and support you. I am your source of life. You might think that you owe me something. The truth is, is that I owe you everything in my life." That is mamash the deepest. Everything we have, is all in the zchus of the children. They remind us of simplicity, of purity, of being joyous for no reason. (See Life is Beautiful if you haven't- the greatness isn't the game that the father comes up with, but the saving grace is the tmimus of the child). Our kids had the simplest joy at this party, because they were happy to be together, to be alive. They weren't thinking of all of the other birthday parties that they weren't invited to that night, or the parties that might have had a better band or better goodie bags. Kids are consumed by their own reality, they have blinders on. They aren't concerned with the other experiences that they might be missing out on. Because in truth, they don't matter. This is what the Mei Shiloach teaches in parshas Noach. The torah says we should live like ants, and this is strange. The Izbitzher (mei shiloach) teaches that if you watch an ant in a colony, he doesn't look at the other ants and compare his job to theirs. he doesn't stare at the queen and wonder why he's not the queen. he knows he'll never be the queen. an ant is content with his job in this world. without all ants thinking such thought, the ant kingdom as a hole will be compromised. I began to experience true contentment and equanimity when i stopped looking into other people's lives to try to determine my next move, or what was lacking in my own. Too often, the real moments that Hashem is blessing us with constantly flicker away among thoughts of what should be, or perhaps what might have been. Shabbos is about looking inward and finding that peace. Shabbos is the letters of Tshuva, to return inward and stop looking at others peoples lives as sources of inspiration. Perhaps that is the meaning of V'eleh Shmos- AND these are the names. The way we survived the exile in Egypt, which ultimately ends with moshiach, is that we never changed our names. we never forgot ourselves. We never stopped looking into our own lives, our own houses to guide us toward holiness. And perhaps this is why We Had Light while the Egyptians had darkness during that 9th plague. We had OHR Bmoshvotehem- we perceived the light of our own birthday party, and didn't allow it to become dimmed by the party with louder music and better cake down the street. 4/5 of the Jews never escaped the darkness. We should be blessed to banish the darkness of outward thinking, and social pressures, and be people of inner light and contentment remembering all the while, the we are Also names, we matter.