Why He Looked So Sad
A look of sadness on the face of someone who always exuded happiness greeted the visitor to the home of a Torah scholar in Bnei Brak. When he met him the next morning in the synagogue he could not resist asking him why he looked so depressed the day before.
"My wife was in a very depressed mood that day," he explained, "and all my efforts to cheer her up met with failure. I finally hit on the idea that if she sees me looking depressed she will certainly try to cheer me up, and in order to do so she will herself have to become cheerful. I therefore put on an act of sadness that I could not drop when you came to the door because my wife was standing next to me and would have seen through my act. My strategy worked and she came out of her bad mood. It was worthwhile embarrassing myself in front of you, with an uncharacteristic show of sadness in order to make my wife happy."
