In a lonely village there lived an impoverished widow with five children.  Each day she eked out a living by taking in laundry for the villagers.  The day came when there was no washing to be done, and not a penny left to buy a crust of bread.  The children cried and pulled at her apron, begging for something to eat.  The mother’s heart broke within her.  She turned to the Father of Orphans, and pleaded: “Dear G-d in Heaven, please have pity on my poor, hungry children, and give me food for them!”

The Sages teach us that the Gate of Tears always remains open to our prayers.  Heaven heard her pleas and led her outdoors, where she discovered an egg by the wayside.  Overcome with joy, she picked it up and showed it to the children. 

“How wonderful!” she exclaimed.  “Thank Heaven, we’re saved!” She cuddled the egg in her hands and started to sing and dance.

The little ones clustered around her.  “Mommy!  Please cook the egg for us now!  We’re so hungry!” pleaded her little ones.  “You can sing and dance afterwards!”

“But this egg is not for cooking,” explained the mother with a wide smile. “No, no children!  Don’t be in such a hurry.  If we eat this egg today, we’ll loose our fortune.  Let’s be wise, and look ahead to the future.

“We’ll ask a kind neighbor to put our egg in the nest of one of her hens, together with the hen’s eggs, so that it will hatch into a little chick.  Then we’ll feed the chick and look after it, until it grows up and becomes a mother hen that gives us more and more eggs, another one each day!  Imagine!”

“But Mother, we’re hungry right now!” begged the children.  “We want to eat the egg today, not to wait for it to hatch!”

Mother had no ear for their cries.  She was completely taken up with her vision of a better future, and continued to describe it to her youngsters:

“Then, when we have all those eggs, our own hen will sit on them to keep them warm and hatch them.  We’ll have a whole chicken coop full of hens laying eggs for us to sell.

“When we have enough, we can sell the chickens and buy a cow!  Imagine having a cow, children!  We will have fresh, creamy milk to drink every day!”  Little hands of hungry children reached out for the egg, but Mother held it up high to protect it. As though in a trance, she continued to describe the beautiful, well-fed future she saw for them.

“When the cow gives birth to a calf,” she continued, “we’ll look after it and take it out to pasture, so it will grow up large and strong.  Then we can hitch a harness to it and use it to plow our field…”

“Mommy, we want something to eat…” interrupted the children impatiently.  Again and again they reached out, trying to take the egg from their mother’s hands, but she held it high over her head and continued to prance with joy at the thought of the wonderful wealth this egg would bring them.

“Then, when we bring in the harvest from our fields…” she continued her saga of good fortune, “we’ll sell the grain and…”

Oops!  She tripped on a stone, the egg fell to the ground and smashed to pieces.

That was the end of the poor widow’s dreams, and the poor children remained as hungry as ever.

*******

What does all this have to do with Rosh Hashanah, you might ask.

As we stand in prayer and review our deeds of the past year, we tend to make endless resolutions about how we will improve our ways during the year to come.  Our Sages warn us: “If you try to grasp hold of too much, you will not grasp hold of anything.”

Better to proceed slowly, at a steady pace, one small step at a time, than to make grandiose plans to leap forward, and end up with nothing but a broken egg.