Building Reaps Satisfaction

The game of Lego was invented by a man named Ole Kirk Kristiansen in 1932. He set out to revolutionize the toy industry with the innovation of this novel idea. At the time, people thought he was crazy and mocked his idea. Who wants to build their own toy, they reasoned. Today, a staggering five million pieces of Lego are created every hour, and seven sets of Lego are bought per second. Indeed, his idea became so beloved that today The Lego Group Company is a ten billion dollar company.

In this week’s Parshah we are introduced to the mitzvah of Brit Milah, as Avraham Avinu, at the age of 99, is the first person to perform this mitzvah. The Sefer ha’Chinuch asks an interesting question: Why is it that Hashem created our physical bodies incomplete? The Creator of the entire universe, including our bodies, could have simply created our bodies already circumcised. Hashem specifically created us incomplete to show us that just as we are born incomplete physically, we are also born incomplete spiritually. We are brought into this world in order to complete a mission, to work on ourselves and become better people.

That is one the messages revealed to us through the mitzvah of Brit Milah. The greatest nachat that the Ribono Shel Olam has from us is when we perfect our character traits and try to behave more in line with the will of Hashem.

When the Lego game was first released, the public thought it was a crazy concept because you had to build the toys yourself. However, eventually it became one of the most popular toys in the history of the world because human nature is that a person experiences great satisfaction when he builds something himself, and all the more so will he experience the greatest satisfaction when he builds himself.