G-d’s in charge!! “The whole world is one big connection…!”
My father passed away in New York in March of 2007, and our family was “sitting shiva” together for the week of mourning at my brother Joel’s house in Long Island. I (Mordechai Siev) planned to go into Brooklyn for Shabbat to finish the shiva week there, in order to be more easily available to my friends.
On Friday morning it started to snow and sleet, and by noon time the roads were treacherous. As it became closer to Shabbat, my mom said she didn’t want me driving into Brooklyn in such weather.
After considering possible alternatives, I called the local Chabad representative in Huntington, Long Island, Rabbi Asher Vaisfiche, who had helped me out by arranging minyans locally during the shiva week. He agreed that I should come and stay with him for Shabbat, but he admitted that so far he has only four people for the minyan: me, him, the assistant rabbi and his brother-in-law. He said that he would make phone calls to get the other six needed for a minyan so I could say kaddish for the soul elevation of my father.
When I arrived at his house forty-five minutes before Shabbat, the weather had gotten even worse. The rabbi was still trying to arrange the minyan but wasn’t exactly sure how to accomplish it. Then, fifteen minutes before Shabbat, the rabbi got a phone call from a carful of six yeshiva students who were stuck on the Long Island Expressway and wanted to know if they could come and spend Shabbat with him! The rabbi agreed and we had our minyan.
The rabbi told me that in all of his fifteen years until then in Huntington he never had a minyan for all of the Shabbat prayer services. So, our minyan was very special and we had a tremendous Shabbat together.
Now turn the clock back another twenty-five years, to the early 1980’s.
I was a student at the Lubavitch yeshiva in Morristown, New Jersey, and I was in charge of driving yeshiva students on Friday to their community outreach projects and then picking them up to go to Crown Heights to be with the Lubavitcher Rebbe for Shabbat. That Friday morning it started to snow, so we decided because of the weather conditions to set out earlier. I gathered my friends and we left the yeshiva, all twelve of us, and headed out to different points in New Jersey.
When I went to pick up everybody, the snow was falling very heavily. We tried to make it over the Goethel’s bridge towards Brooklyn, but the bridge was closed and we had to turn around and head back to Morristown.
The driving was extremely difficult in the blizzard conditions. I made it only halfway, as far as Livingston, NJ, when I had to pull the van over to the side of the road – it was already only five minutes before Shabbat.
We put on all our clothing, locked the van and started to walk in the snow. We finally got to a neighborhood and started searching for a house with a mezuzah on the door. When we found one, we knocked on the front door. A woman looked out from above and called out to her husband, “Irving, don’t open up, they are coming from the yeshiva to try to collect money.”
I yelled to her “Lady, are you serious? We are stranded and there is a big snow storm going on; please open up,” but it did not help. We had to trudge on.
A few doors further and we found another mezuzah. We knocked on the door, and this time the reaction was very different. A man opened the door and immediately smiled at us and said, “Come in, come in, my friends.”
We piled in and he started to count how many we were. “A minyan!” he exclaimed. “I’ve been saying kaddish for my father all year and thought because of the snow storm I would have to miss it for the first time. And now G-d Al-mighty has blessed me with all of you wonderful students.” We stayed for both Mincha and Maariv (Afternoon and Evening Prayers), much to his great appreciation. After that we had to walk for an hour and a half to the house of Rabbi Kasowitz, the local Chabad emissary in West Orange, NJ, who welcomed us warmly and fed us excellently.
Clearly, with that minyan for my father on that stormy Shabbat in Long Island, G-d was paying me back twenty-five years later for the minyan in New Jersey. I saw how the whole world and all of our lives is one big connection.
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Note: Rabbi Mordechai “Big Mo” Siev has been an important cog in the success of Ascent since the beginning in Elul (September) 1983 when he was an unmarried yeshiva student, until now when he is a happy grandfather of many. Kn”h.
His father’s name is Avraham Shimon ben Yaakov Shlomo z”l , may his memory be blessed and be an inspiration for Rabbi Siev, his family and all of us.
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Rabbi Yerachmiel Tilles is co-founder of Ascent, webmaster and managing editor of KabbalaOnline.org and ascentofsafed.com. He has hundreds of published stories to his credit.
The books of Rabbi Yerachmiel Tilles can be purchased through Ascent at https://www.kabbalaonline-shop.com/searchresults.asp?Search=Tilles&Submit=
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