The Woman's Word — Today Is a Day of Harvest and Reaping

Today is a day of harvest and reaping...

'And what shall I reap this year?' says the student. 'Will my harvest be pure wheat, its grains full, or shriveled, sickly wheat?... And what a disappointment if my whole harvest turns out to be darnel!!'

And his joints tremble as he casts the first glance at the results of his harvest... a pass with honors, a bare pass — or perhaps his name is at the bottom of the list... utter failure. What wasted effort!!

*

Did this failed student really strive — he whose results are no sooner announced than the whole household is up in arms and a fit of hysteria seizes him: it is the biased teacher; it is the schoolmistress who has borne a grudge against him ever since...; it is the school devoid of order... Blame rains down at random on every head except the pupil's own head, and responsibility settles on every pair of shoulders except the shoulders of the failed pupil... And what fault is it of the pupil's, if the teachers are biased and the schools are in chaos beyond all chaos?!

*

Is this crooked state of things anything but a miniature of the intellectual chaos we suffer? Is it anything but one page among the pages of the life we live every day?

When does one of us succeed in his life, and when does he fail? Does that not always happen — by our reckoning — as the result of one man's backing, or of another's opposition and enmity?! And how do we usually set our failure beside another's success? Does not the loathsome worm of suspicion gnaw at our heads, so that we resort to the scales of yellow jealousy, weighing in them people's abilities, until our eyes are falsified against true seeing and our consciences blackened against discerning the truth, even in broad daylight??...

Why do we make of our hearts raging volcanoes in which hatred and envy blaze, and aim our hatred and our envy at the successful among people, like spat-out poisons, our sole object being to strike them and to drag down their dignity?

Why, one wonders, should people's success not be a spur to us toward work and advancement? Why should we not be positive builders, climbing the ladder with the climbers, instead of being negative, and trying, with meanness and pettiness, to batter down their thrones and demolish their palaces, so as to cool by it our rancor and our spite?

Let us free ourselves from this day on from the fetters of the small, cowardly self, and let us take toward ourselves the stance of the impartial, just weigher. For every reaper reaps only what he has sown, and everyone who succeeds only meets the fruit of his toil and diligence. This pupil passed with honors because he strove and labored; that one failed because he slackened and idled... And that man of high standing is esteemed because he is energetic and watchful over his own interest.

And it is for man to strive....