Too Much Kovod

It is told that Rav Raphael once visited Berditchev, where he was received with great honor and much fanfare. Afterward, he disappeared. A search party went looking for him and found him in the marketplace, surrounded by a crowd of simple people and merchants, all laughing at the “batlan” (good-for-nothing), a strange-looking man with a handkerchief tied over his head.

When they asked him why he had disappeared and why he was acting so oddly, Rav Raphael explained that the outpouring of honor had distressed him. They had simply inflated his ego with too much kovod (honor), so he had tied a handkerchief over his head and walked into a fabric store, asking to buy some snuff. The owner saw a simpleton and a stranger who was certainly acting oddly, and he poked fun at him, taking him from store to store in search of the imaginary snuff while they all had a hearty laugh. “In this way they belittled and mocked me,” Rav Raphael explained, “and I was spared all the honor.”