A strand of potato falls into the boiling oil.

I don’t notice.

I’m making patties.

In the meantime the little strand that fell into the oil starts to burn.

I still don’t notice.

Until someone calls down the steps “What’s burning down there?”

I look around and find it a strand of potato.

I remove it.

Opening all the windows I keep thinking about how that little single strand of potato could make so much smoke.

Then I start to think about how a single strand of a bad middah like pride or a strand of words can really mess things up.

Did you ever meet someone and although everything about them is supposedly A-OK the whole time you feel like something’s off? Something doesn’t smell right.

But you can’t put your finger on it; you just know it gets you all choked up on some level whenever you see them.

Then one day you hear the news about what you felt was off or you see the evidence right there in front of your eyes clear as the smell of potato strand burning in the oil.

And you know you’re not crazy.

There it is that strand of pride or jealousy or hatred burning in someone’s heart.

A small tiny strand.

I think of batel b’shishim (nullified in 60). If milk for example falls into a meat soup the soup is permissible so long as the milk constitutes no more than one-sixtieth of the meat soup. If so the milk is discounted it’s outweighed. The soup is 100 percent kosher.

But some things are just plain treif. They treif up anything they touch and there’s no way to salvage the rest.

Like a little speck of blood in an egg.

I think about what those things are in us that can trip us up and yet still allow us to be kosher good friends family members and members of society.

And what those things or traits are that are dangerous and “smoke up the place.”

I heard a story about a woman who no matter how much kindness she did for her daughter there was still something there you couldn’t put you finger on but it simmered beneath the surface. The woman’s smile always seemed to say “I’m with you heart and soul ” but her actions were somehow incongruent.

One day the daughter calls me.

“It’s so confusing something’s really wrong here” she tells me. “My mother is always saying how much she loves me and how much she does for me providing good food and clothing and a nice home to live in but it never feels like that. I don’t feel like she loves me. It’s not coming across. Why?” she asks all choked up.

The next day she calls back.

The truth had slipped. Right out of her mother’s mouth.

“I’m mad at you” her mother had told her “because you’re not what I wanted. You’re an embarrassment and you’ve ruined my life.”

There it is the thought that’s always been burning in her mother’s heart and clear as the smell of burning potato strand floating in oil.

It’s no wonder the daughter felt all choked up. It wasn’t her imagination. There was something burning in her mother’s heart and it was smoking up her daughter’s world.

Just like that single strand of potato.