The Fireman. - הכבאי

Many years ago, every town had a tower in which sat a guard that alarmed all of the citizens when a fire broke out. When people heard the trumpet they immediately ran to the river and filled up buckets

of water to extinguish the fire.

Once upon a time a foreign young man visited one of those towns. Suddenly he had heard a trumpet. The young man did not understand that has going on around him. The town’s citizens explained to

him: when a fire brakes out, the guard blows the trumpet. This way everybody knows

 there is a fire and they run to extinguish it.

The young man liked that idea very much and decided to import it to his hometown. What did he do? He set  one of his town’s roof on fire. The fire spread quickly from one roof to the other. He stood and blew the trumpet loudly in order to try and stop the fire. But the fire did not go off and all the houses were burned to the ground.

The town people got very mad at him and told him: don’t you understand that the trumpet does not     extinguish fire. It is only a signal, a sing that awakens the people so that they will get up and put off the fire.

This story is a parable for blowing the shofar. We need to understand that hearing the shofar is insignificant. The shofar is only a sing that we are to make up, we are to go over our deeds in order to correct the bad ones.