My fervent plea is that this blogpost come off as enlightening and thought-provoking, not judgmental or self-righteous. Amen. What a great preamble, huh?!

On Thursday my husband and I were grocery shopping together (Yeah, that's our idea of a great date, okay!) and our overcrowded cart overflowed with the only casualties a battered box of matzah and a plastic container of tomato salad which exploded all over the floor. So being that I'm way beyond getting embarrassed by these types of mishaps (!), I calmly stayed behind at the scene of the crime while my husband went to customer service to ask them to send a cleaner. Why did I stay at the spill site? Hmmmm....Let's see. I guess I would call it a very crude form of social responsibility. Tomato sauce all over the floor....People all over the floor....Right?

Now the fallen tomato sauce is only the side-dish in the story. The entree is my fellow Jewess shopping in Aisle One. I'm standing in the checkout line. This middle-aged shopper is selecting shampoo. And...oops! Gravity claims yet another victim--a bottle of Pantene conditioner (Yes, they have Pantene in Israel!) explodes on the floor. Ouch, but that's life, right? But the splatters of conditioner now adorning the floor might as well be a red carpet rolled out for said shopper as she breezily wheels her cart right past the broken bottle, skirting the spill as she goes to locate the rest of her groceries.

And I? Horrified would be a good place to start.

Middos (character traits) are really, really, really, REALLY important. (Listen up, kids!) A person lacking the decency to at least alert customer service about a spill has an illness--a social illness. Who knows what other symptoms manifest themselves from this illness! I do. As God would have it, this wanton conditioner breaker (I, of course, am an un-wanton tomato-sauce-container breaker....but now I am starting to sound self-righteous...) happens to check out in the aisle next to me. There is a piece of paper in her cart, left behind by some careless individual. Wanton doesn't like the paper in her cart. It doesn't match the shopping bag theme. So what does she do? Well, what would YOU do if there was a piece of paper in YOUR cart? She crumples it up and hurls it onto the floor!! Yeah!

By this time "horrified" pales in comparison to all-out disbelief and, I dunno, what's worse than "horrified"? I asked my husband if I should say something to her. He gave me one of those "I'm taking no liability for this" answers and I, fuming, decided to take action. I picked up the paper from the floor and placed it on my own checkout bay. Wanton said nothing.

A few minutes into grocery hauling, Wanton asks the cashier for a piece of paper. She wants to write something down. Maybe she wants to write a letter of apology to anyone who may have slipped on the conditioner-greased floor. Cashier doesn't have a paper. I reach into the checkout bay and pull out...the crumpled paper I rescued from its disgrace on the floor. The same hand that hurled now grabs it from my outstretched fingers. Don't worry--she didn't say thank you.

I am not writing this to make fun of an individual. I am writing it to highlight the tragedy of bad middos. Bad middos are scary. They can injure people--physically and emotionally. And the scariest part is that many people with "Middos Disease" are not even aware of their illness. It's the fortunate person who knows him or herself enough to recognize which character traits need polishing.