There are things that one cannot get through without believing in hashgachah pratis every step of the way. I am a melamed, and there is a boy in my class who has a severe allergy to milk products. It is impossible to keep watch all the time and to protect him from even a crumb of something milchig. Only Hashem can really guard him all the time.
Obviously, we do our hishtadlus. In the yeshivah where I teach, the melamed has the responsibility. The children in the class know that Moishy is allergic to milk, and so if the child who sits near him brings something milchig to eat, he is to tell me.
Usually the child who sits near Moishy is considerate and brings only pareve food with him, but sometimes his parents forget, and they put a cheese sandwich into his schoolbag.
That day, the child discovered he had a cheese sandwich, and he came over to me to tell me that he had milchigs. So I called Moishy over and told him to sit near me to eat.
Moishy took out a slice of American cheese and started eating. “What are you eating?” I was shocked. “It’s milchig!”
“It’s not milchig,” Moishy told me calmly, “it’s pareve.”
But I was not calm. The cheese looked too real. I told him not to eat it, and I called his father. “Are you sure the cheese he’s eating is not milchig?” I asked the father.
“Oh, no!” his father answered fearfully. “That’s real cheese! It was supposed to go into Moishy’s brother’s schoolbag. Please make sure he doesn’t eat it.”
Baruch Hashem, precisely on the day when Moishy was in danger because of the food he himself had brought, he had to come to sit near me, and thus a tragedy was averted.
