The Observant Jew

There’s a Lesson There Somewhere

When we spent Yom Tov with family, my cousin’s son asked me how I come up with ideas for my column. “How do you find so many inspiring things?” he asked. I thought a moment then explained. “It’s not that inspiring things happen and I see them. Things happen all the time, but when you train yourself to look for them and be inspired, you turn them into inspiring moments.”

While I was wondering what I would write about this time, I went (where else?) to the supermarket. As I paused to let a woman back out of her parking spot, I was incensed when another driver drove around me on the left, effectively blocking the older woman who had now backed out and begun turning in that direction. He didn’t back up to let her out, but instead made this elderly woman back up so that he could drive past her! He then pulled into a spot that someone else had vacated while I was waiting for the woman to move.

What was wrong with this guy? Has he got no patience? Can’t he see that this woman was backing out and that I was waiting? I pulled into a different spot and went over to wait for him to exit, thinking he could probably use the piece of my mind I wanted to give him. That’s when I noticed that he’d parked right in the middle of two spots. That was too much.

As I stood there, the driver, a Chasidic fellow, and the passenger, a Hispanic one, both got out. “He’s learning to drive,” apologized the passenger. “Yes,” agreed the driver. “I didn’t realize that it was two lanes for two different directions.” With that, he walked away, and the driving instructor got behind the wheel and left, leaving me flabbergasted.

I had been upset that the guy was oblivious to everyone else and was focused solely on getting where he wanted. While it was true, there was some room to excuse him because he wasn’t an experienced driver. I told myself, “There’s a lesson in there somewhere.” I wasn’t ready at the moment to identify what I would take from the incident, but at least I knew I was looking at something that had a message.

Inside the store, I saw a candy dispenser that was on sale. I decided that my daughter in camp would get a real kick out of it. I put it in my wagon and moved on. As I did so, a thought struck me. Had she been in the store with me and said, “Ooooh! Can we buy a candy dispenser?” I know my knee-jerk reaction would have been to say no. We don’t need it, it’s probably poorly made, and we didn’t come here to buy that.

Once again, I realized that there was a lesson – and maybe an article – there. Perhaps about how absence makes the heart grow fonder, or whether we are more generous to others when they can’t fend for themselves, there were lessons to be learned, and it was OK if I didn’t figure them out on the spot.

When I checked out of the supermarket, and the total (on one of my myriad daily trips) was $26.14, I smiled and even took a picture of the amount. Why? Because there was a lesson in there.

If you know gematrios, how each letter in Hebrew has a numerical value and words have the numerical value of the sum of their letters, you may have picked up on the first gematria that caught my eye. Twenty-six is the numerical value of the letters yud, hay, vov, and hay, Hashem’s name which conveys His presence and influence in the past, present and future.

Fourteen is the gematria of yud and daled, which form the word ‘yad,’ meaning hand. When I saw $26.14, (taking into account that in Hebrew we read from right to left) I literally saw, ‘Yad Hashem,’ the hand of G-d, in my life. Those little blips and messages show up on our radar all the time, especially when we enhance our capabilities by tuning into the right frequency.

They tell us: There’s a lesson in there somewhere. Then it’s up to us to figure it out.

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