I live on the top floor, in an attic apartment. There is a roof over my head, and above it is the sky. If the sun is boiling, it beats right down on our roof. If it is raining, we are the first to receive the blessing. Pigeons seeking a place to rest find lodging on our roof. And aside from all these gifts from above, there are some issues coming up from below as well: The roof serves as a small storage room for things that are not in use, or, more correctly, for dreams of people who think that a day will come when they will use the items they left there. What happens over time is that in the heat those things wither and break or even melt, and then throughout the year our rooftop fills with a layer of garbage created from both the heavens above and the earth below.
I recalled how last winter we suffered from leaks into our apartment, and I decided that this year we would prepare for the winter properly. Just after closing the roof of our sukkah, I would empty out the whole roof and prepare it for a proper tarring, so that our apartment would be considered suitable lodgings for human beings.
This was on a Friday. I went up to the roof energetically, equipped with garbage bags, a sponja stick and a dustpan, I worked on the roof of my home. I discovered all sorts of leftovers from construction and plastering that had blown over from the nearby buildings. I did not find, as in those nice stories, a piece of a missile so that I could inform everyone publicly that we’d been saved from being hit. I comforted myself with the fact that the missile never landed here to begin with, which is also a great chessed.
Thus, feeling happy that I was doing something important for my family, I cleaned and emptied out the place until the clock showed that it was after chatzos. Chatzos is chatzos, and I do not do any melachah that is not directly connected to Shabbos kodesh after chatzos. The whole matter of cleaning the roof could wait until Sunday; I was stopping my work.
I left it all in the middle, just as it was. Half collected, half clean; everything could easily end up spread out again and dirty as it had been in the beginning, but I was finished for the day. Somehow I twisted the tops of the garbage bags so they would stay closed, in the hope that the wind would not untie them, and I went back down to my house. Shabbos would spread its wings over us today, and I wanted to be prepared already from chatzos.
On Sunday I returned to the roof to continue clearing the garbage, and wonder of wonders: Everything was clean! All the garbage was cleared away, all the sacks disappeared. I did not have to do anything. The roof was prepared for tarring.
I think one of the neighbors was involved. I have a neighbor who loves to help, and probably he also had to close the roof of his sukkah, which is adjacent to mine, and when he saw that the work was half done, he simply completed it.
I was zocheh to safeguard the honor of Shabbos, and Hakadosh Baruch Hu sent me a good messenger to save my precious time.
