By Dvora Kiel
I was on a bus on my way home from Bnei Brak. One of the passengers approached the driver and said he found a cell phone on his seat. The driver said he thought it might belong to one of a group of workers who travel on his bus every morning to a factory in Bnei Brak. So, the driver decided to keep the phone and ask the workers the next morning if one of them was indeed the owner.
While the phone was in the driver’s hand, it rang. Instinctively the driver answered and found himself speaking to the owner of the phone. The two discussed when and how the phone would reach its rightful owner. The entire conversation took no longer than half a minute.
An eagle-eyed traffic cop spotted the cell phone in the hand of the driver and came on his motorcycle in pursuit of the bus. All eyes were on the driver as he pulled over to the side of the road.
The policeman wanted to give the driver a ticket for speaking on the phone while driving. Naturally the driver attempted to explain that he never, ever spoke on the phone while driving, but this was an unusual, unavoidable happening. The policeman was adamant. At this point, all the passengers intervened. They thought it was grossly unfair to penalize the driver for a once-in-a-lifetime coincidence.
To everyone’s utter astonishment, the policeman told the driver that if he would agree to put on tefillin from that day forward and promise to do so forevermore, he would tear up the ticket! The driver accepted the condition on the spot, and the policeman rode off.
The driver then told the passengers this curious story. He said that for some time he had wanted to return to the ways of his parents. He had been postponing it daily, not sure exactly how to begin. Now, here was a sure sign from Heaven. Besides, he said, this only shows the truth of the saying of the Sages that one misvah brings another in its wake.
I heard the rest of the story from a friend who was on the same bus later that day. He had been the last passenger off the bus, and the driver, who was not wearing a kippah, walked a few paces with my friend, saying he was in a hurry to get home to put on tefillin before sundown. When my friend evinced curiosity, the driver told him that he had promised someone that morning that he would begin putting on tefillin that day and did not want to break his word.
I would have found the story impossible to believe if I had not witnessed it myself. (When the time is Right)
Reprinted from the Parashat Ki Tisa 5786 email of Rabbi David Bibi’s Shabbat Shalom from Cyberspace. Excerpted from the book – “When the Time is Right” by Dvora Kiel.
