It was a week before Rosh Hashana – the 23rd of Ellul 5753 (1993), 11:00 pm. There I was, a sixteen-year-old boy with a heavy pack on his back, roaming around the central bus station of Jerusalem, helpless. In another quarter of an hour the last bus to Kfar Chabad, my hometown, was due to leave, and it was absolutely imperative that I be on it – for the following morning I was supposed to be on a flight to New York, to spend the month of holidays with the Rebbe. I was helpless, because I was missing ten shekels in order to buy a ticket for the bus. This was not very much money, but when you don’t have it, even a little bit can seem like a lot.
I first tried to enlist the help of strangers: “I need ten shekels in order to get home.” But they just looked at me as I always had looked at those who are always to be found at any station or bus stop, asking for just a few shekels in order to get to Haifa or wherever… So I roamed around, feeling miserable. I suppose it was noticeable, for suddenly an impressive looking gentleman with a graying beard approached me and asked me in Yiddish: “Young man, why are you going around with a Tisha B’av face?” I told him my story, and he immediately gave me ten shekels. I asked him for his address so that I could pay him back, but he smiled at me and said a sentence that has never left me: “You will return the money, but not to me. Whenever you see someone who needs help, help him; in that way I will get paid back.”
Fourteen years later – again, a week before Rosh Hashana, the 23rd of Ellul 5767 (2007); it is 4:30 pm, and I am a young man walking quickly with a small suitcase in the Kennedy Airport in New York. In an hour and a half I am due to board a flight home, to Basel, on my way back from a Shabbat at the Rebbe’s, as I do every year before Rosh Hashana. Suddenly I see a young woman with a large suitcase, looking desperate. I approach her and ask her what the problem is. Her face lights up with hope, and she says, “I missed my flight to Eretz Yisrael. They are willing to put me on a Delta flight that leaves in another hour, but it turns out that my credit card is not international, and I have no way to pay for this new flight.”
And there I am – back in the Central Bus Station in Jerusalem, fourteen years earlier, and the man is saying to me, “You will return the money, but not to me…”
“My credit card is international,” I tell her, as the Delta people take it. “You are like an angel from Heaven. Six children are waiting for me at home,” she says to me with tears in her eyes, and she doesn’t know that I am actually near the 433 bus in the Central Bus Station in Jerusalem, looking with delight at that friendly man, and telling him, “I have returned the money.”
If he only knew how much those ten shekels have cost me from then until today…
My friends, I have not come to talk about myself, but about the anonymous Jew who taught me in one moment of truth, with ten shekels, what is not taught in any Yeshiva or university. He taught me to look around and try to see if there is anyone in need of help. He also taught me a lesson about giving gracefully and with a smile.
For years, I have been looking for a way to thank him for it, but I have no idea where to find him. And today, when I tell this story and pass on his message, it seems to me that that is the most fitting thank-you for him.
Yom Kippur is coming, and this is the time for me to wish everybody a Gmar Chatima Tova, that it should be a good and sweet year, a year in which we will know how to give to others happily, with a smile.
Zalmen Wishedski