Saturday, April 6, 2013

More Mivtzoyim Tales

Ok, so... How was everyone's Pesach? I forgot to ask in the last post...
Anyways, if you happen to live with me, you'll already know the details of this story, so If I leave anything out, contact me and I'll fix it, iy"h.

The first week back from Purim break, on a Friday, I went on mivtzoyim with the principal's son, who I regularly go with. As we were making our usual rounds, a man named Shraga walked into the store we happened to be in. Shraga is a ba'al teshuva, or someone who came back to Judaism. We go visit his son, Josh, as one of our regulars. He works with his father. Josh usually doesn't want to put tefillin on, so Ari (the principal's son) and I give him a pamphlet, and carry on.
That week, Josh was unavailable at that time, so we were told to come back later. In the next store, we saw Shraga. He said he would let us in to the store, which could only be accessed by someone in the store or someone with a key, which was Shraga. So, we went upstairs and waited. As we were waiting, Ari set up the tefillin, just in case he would want to put on.
To make a very, VERY long story short, we ended up having an hour-long argument about two things: putting on tefillin/why it is a good thing to do, and isle everything that happens is Devine Providence, or chance. Close to the end of the argument, Shraga went into his office to take a phone call. After about five minutes, he called into the main room, where we all were. We heard him say "Josh, listen to this," and then a woman speaking. It was Shraga's sister-in-law, whose brother had had a stroke in January (This was mid- to late-February), and couldn't move his left side. They did a routine surgery to fix this, but after the surgery, he still couldn't move his left arm and left leg. This could be fixed by physical therapy, so he was moved to the physical therapy ward. Over Purim, a few bochurim from the yeshiva came to the hospital, and were going around reading the Megillah and putting tefillin on people. This man was one of those people, and after they took off the tefillin, he could move his let arm again!
The story isn't over yet. Shraga's sister-in-law had NEVER called his office before, and had decided to call "out of the blue". Shraga had never been downtown on a Friday before, and had he not been there, Ari and I would not have been able to see this amazing thing happen right in front of our eyes.
The story doesn't have such a good ending. Josh didn't end up putting on tefillin. But, we're still working on him...

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