I live in Bnei Brak, and my parents live in Yerushalayim’s Ramot neighborhood. They came to us for Shabbos and greatly enjoyed our children. On Motzaei Shabbos, they planned to take a taxi to the bus stop, and then to take the 422 bus, which would bring them to their home in Ramot. I went downstairs and waited with them for the taxi. “Hashem, please help so that a taxi comes quickly to take us to the bus-stop,” I davened in my own words.
“That’s not how you daven,” my father told me. “Ask Hashem to take us to our destination, l’chaim ul’shalom. We ask for it to be good without adding details of how. We don’t know exactly what is good for us.”
Abba had just finished speaking when a taxi approached our home. We waved it down, and the driver stopped near us.
“Can you take us to the bus stop?” I asked.
“I have no time,” the driver said. “I need to go to Yerushalayim.”
“We also need to go to Yerushalayim,” my father told him.
“I’m going to Ramot,” the driver specified. Ramot is on the outskirts of Yerushalayim, and it means he would be taking a different route.
“We’re also headed to Ramot,” my father responded.
The driver smiled and said, “Welcome. You can travel with us.”
He took a token price from my parents, less than what a taxi in Bnei Brak and then a bus would have cost them. We wished each other a gut voch, and my dear parents traveled to Yerushalayim in a private taxi.
We waved goodbye to them as the taxi left, leaving us with a resounding message: A person doesn’t know what is good for him. Make general requests, rather than specific ones, and you could get something much more expansive than what you expected.
