Rabbi's Message

IF YOU HAD THREE WISHES

         Recently, a classic motion picture was shown on television.  It is entitled The Enchanted Cottage, directed by John Cromwell and starring Dorothy McGuire and Robert Young.  The movie is an adaptation of a play by Arthur Pinero.

It is the story of a man and woman whose faces were so twisted and ugly that anyone who looked upon them immediately cast their eyes down with pity.  In their loneliness, they married and hid their shame in a faraway cottage, where no human being could look upon their ugliness.

In the cottage, a miracle took place.  As the two lived together, they were elated to discover that their ugliness had vanished and in its place was great beauty.  They arranged to give their first party, a surprise party for their friends and relatives.  To their shock, bewilderment and dismay, everyone who saw them cast down their eyes with the same pity as before.  The couple could not understand why their guests saw only ugliness where they only saw beauty.  This man and woman decided that they must be living in an enchanted cottage.

Of course, in reality, there was no enchanted cottage.  There was only the enchantment that was in themselves, the enchantment of their feelings for one another.  Through their love, they could only see each other’s loveliness, because they were lovely in every way to one another.

We are all capable of weaving a spell of enchantment when we love.  We do it by the way we talk, the way we look at another person, the way we treat the one we love.  The change that occurs through love does not change a person’s outward appearance; it happens inside of us- for that is where we manufacture enchantment.

 In words of the 1878 novel Molly Bawn by Margaret Wolfe Hungerford “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”.