One morning, on my way to the yeshivah where I give shiur, I stopped near a car. The driver asked where I was going and graciously offered to take me to the yeshivah. He was happy to perform the mitzvah of hachnasas orchim in his car, and the drive was pleasant. When we arrived I was already pressured for time, and I hurried out of the car. Only after I had entered the yeshivah and seder had begun did I realize that I had forgotten the bag I had with me.
The bag contained a hidden treasure: my notebook of chiddushei Torah, which I had written with great toil over the course of thirty years. I have no other copy of it, and there is no way to reproduce it. Every chiddush in it is a part of me. I had to find that notebook, but I had no idea how, because, unfortunately, I had not left any identifying mark on it. Since I hadn’t written my name, how would the driver of the car reach me?
You have to understand that this is a loss for which there can be no compensation. You can’t comfort me by telling me I’ll be able to write other chiddushim, because I need specifically these chiddushim. For thirty years this notebook has gone everywhere with me, and now, what was I to do? It’s hard to estimate the worth of a notebook like this one, for Torah is “good” – more precious than “thousands of pieces of gold and silver.”
Of course, in the days that followed I did various segulos for finding a lost object. I hung signs in a number of places, and I invested much effort trying to identify the driver of the car. Because I had gotten out of the car near stores, I asked the store owners to try to see on their security cameras the car I had gotten out of, and to try to see its license number. It was moving to see how much they cared, how they responded to my request – rachmanim bnei rachmanim! They looked through their cameras, but the results were dismal for me. One said that just on that day the camera had stopped working. Another told me that specifically during that quarter hour, there was an interval in the filming. A third storeowner found the film of those moments when I left the car. You could actually see how I turned and went on my way, but not the license number of the car.
I continued to daven and hope for a yeshuah. Then the search for that valuable notebook expanded into “nachpesah deracheinu v’nachkorah – we will search and investigate our ways.” In bentching, when saying Hara-chaman, I concentrated and asked
