The room slowly grew brighter, and as the sunlight crept in it became easier to distinguish the black letters on the fading white pages. The Rebbe of Radzyn had been up for quite some time. In fact he had hardly slept. In between short naps that were simply necessities of a physical existence, he held his face close to his sefer and nodded.
What he was looking for was not yet clear, and he knew it would most likely find him before he found it.
But, he must try.
The yidden of Radzyn were so holy. Each one of them kept shabbos, and each of them ate kosher, but there was something amiss and the holy rebbe felt it. There was a pain, a void, an incompleteness, that kept him up that night and forced him into his beis midrash to repair it.
You see, when you and me feel something like this, we complain to the world that we can’t fall asleep. But when the Rebbe felt this, what else could he do but try and fix it?
As he wearily drifted back into this world from another short slumber, he found himself gazing at a pitcher of water on top of a short bookshelf by the door. It held no special significance, but he was drawn to it nonetheless.
In Radzyn, just like everywhere else, people saw strange things all the time. But, unlike everywhere else, the people of this shtetl knew how to see. Not everybody understood immediately what they were looking at, but in Radzyn, at least they knew when they were looking at something that mattered.
The Rebbe continued to inspect the pitcher and noticed it was full, all the way to the top. So full, he thought, as to make it difficult to pour. Standing very still, he searched for the point in his soul that inspired this thought.
"At the expense of what did this pitcher get so full?" he wondered. "Is there another pitcher somewhere that has gone empty?"
