By the time we meet Tobit in the first chapter of the book that bears his name, he has long been in exile in Nineveh, carried away from Israel when the Assyrians captured the Northern Kingdom and resettled the Israelites in Nineveh and other cities in their domain.
Tobit, however, looks back to his days as a young Israelite in the lands of his tribe of Naphtali. Even when everybody else was going to worship at the shrine of the calf that King Jeroboam set up, Tobit would not. He continued to go and worship in Jerusalem as God had commanded. He brought his first fruits and paid the proper tithes. Even though he was the only one of his tribe (or even the only one in the Northern Kingdom) to go to Jerusalem, Tobit did it anyway because it was the right thing to do. He was determined to follow God's will.
It takes courage to go against the crowd. It takes courage to be the only one to stand up for what is right. It takes courage to show one's stance by one's actions and to continue to do that against the opposition of everyone else. Tobit had that courage. He chose God over human beings, and he invites us to do the same.
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