By the Grace of G-d
Dear Friend,
I was not prepared for it.
Bumping into someone who grew up in Norfolk, Virginia.
Norfolk? Why would that excite me?
My colleague Rabbi Nechemya was meeting M. for lunch at JCafe.
M is a Jew who lived here for a while but hadn’t yet made contact with the Jewish community. By Divine Providence (as he was helping someone who needed urgent humanitarian help), Rabbi Wilhelm was introduced to M and scheduled to meet him over lunch.
And I just happened to walk through JCafe as they were lunching. Of course, I was introduced and started immediately with the “Jewish geography’. I didn’t anticipate the result.
In making small talk, M told me that he grew up in Norfolk.
I mentioned that Norfolk is the city that I took my first steps in life.
He looked at me quizzically. And I explained that my parents had lived in Norfolk for a year or so as my father had been the headmaster of the Tidewater Hebrew Academy. It was there that I actually learned to walk.
‘I attended the Tidewater Hebrew Academy’ my new friend said. ‘And my mother taught there for a while’. We both realized that M being a few years older than me, was a student at the Jewish day school that my father was heading when I was taking my first toddler steps in that same not so central locale.
What a tiny world!!!
My uncle took over the Tidewater position after we left for Australia and my new friend M remembered my uncle even more clearly.
M couldn’t have been older than ten at the time, but he remembers very clearly one of the lines of a Chanukah play that had been written by my uncle.
In describing the celebration of Chanukah as being the time when we light candles, the line of the play went as follows:
‘We don’t celebrate the military victory, rather the spiritual victory of the rededication of the Temple’
Phenomenal. A ten-year-old kid. A Chanukah play. Not even a formal scholastic lesson. The words and concept remain so clearly and indelibly ingrained within him for nearly five decades.
For me it was such a warm and reassuring ‘regards’ from G-d through His web of what seem to be ‘random’ events that all tie seamlessly together as a singular albeit multi-part jigsaw puzzle.
We all ‘know’ that Hashem is in ‘charge’.
When Hashem gives you a window into Divine Providence it becomes all that more vivid and palpable. It felt to me like getting a ‘Heavenly Hug’.
Two kids in Norfolk. Both Jewish. One a toddler, one a primary school kid. Too big an age gap to have any interaction. Each traveling on their own journey and engaged in very different vocations. One a PHD in social sciences, the other a rabbi. Five decades later, more than fourteen thousand kilometers away, they meet up again. To me, this is so providential. It uplifted me. Reminded me clearly about our footsteps being guided by the Hand of G-d.
Couldn’t resist sharing it.
The lesson?
The power of our messaging. Formal. And even more powerfully, our informal messaging.
If you are a teacher or a parent, realize that your children will carry your messages for the rest of their lives. Not only the ‘formal’ ones. It may be those things you do or say when you think you are doing something ‘extracurricular’ that will make the deepest impression.
Make sure to share, teach and live with meaning and inspiration, so that you will spread messages of eternal value via your students and offspring.
In this week’s Torah portion, we are told about the transmission of Torah at the Mountain of Sinai.
As Jews we declared ‘we will do and will understand’.
Do the right thing.
Then understand how important it was.
Don’t wait till you understand the importance.
You may never get to the doing part.
Put tzedakah in the tzedakah pushka (box) every day and even more than once. Your kids and friends will mimic you eventually.
Speak nicely to others. It will go a long way to healing the hurt of the out of control way people have started speaking to each other in our fractured society.
Say a prayer of thanks to Hashem every morning for the gift of life. It will be catchy. An atmosphere of thankfulness will spread in concentric circles outwards to generate a more gratitude filled society.
When the Torah was given, it brought healing to the world. Everyone was healed by the G-dly energy that accompanied the Torah’s being given.
May those energies be manifest in our world today. May the world be blessed by G-d with HEALTH & PEACE and MASHIACH NOW.
Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi Yosef Kantor