So That It Will Be Good for You

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 Harachaman, I concentrated and asked Hashem to show me what I needed to rectify; and Hashem enlightened me. I recalled that until recently, I was visiting my parents at least once a week, and lately, since before I lost the notebook, I had stopped visiting them. Who knew? Perhaps Hakadosh Baruch Hu was sending me this difficulty in order to arouse me regarding this mitzvah? The passuk states that one should honor one’s parents “so that it will be good for you,” and from this positive statement we can learn the opposite as well. If in the merit of honoring parents we merit all the good, then a lack of honoring one’s parents can result in the good being taken away, and there is nothing as good as Torah! Perhaps the loss of the chiddushei Torah was in order to cause me to return to honoring my parents properly?

Since I reached this conclusion, I got up and went to my parents’ home. They were happy that I visited, and when I left I told myself that from now on I would try to honor them and visit them often, as I had been doing before.

The very next day (!) my father called and asked, “Did you lose a notebook of chiddushei Torah?”

“Yes,” I said with great joy.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.

I told him I hadn’t wanted to cause him pain. And then he told me what had happened “behind the scenes.”

The owner of the car where I left the notebook is accustomed to visiting his father every day. When I joined him for the ride, he was on his way to his daily visit to his sick father, and after I got out of the car, he discovered the bag I had left behind.

He tried to identify the owner of the notebook – unsuccessfully, for I hadn’t left a clue as to my name. He brought the notebook to his father and asked him if he had any idea as how to reach the person who lost it. The notebook remained there.

One day, someone came to this father for a bikur cholim visit. The father showed his friend the notebook and asked him if he could identify the owner of the notebook. The guest leafed through it until he discovered on one of the pages, in small letters, a family name. Because he knew my father, he took the notebook and brought it to my father when he was sitting in the beis medrash after Shacharis.

Then I was zocheh to get the long-awaited phone call, when I received the good news that my lost item had been found. I saw a special he’arah from Shamayim in this whole episode, that this indeed was the tikkun that was demanded of me. The loss took place in the car of a person who merits to honor his father every day, at a time that I had become weak in the mitzvah of honoring my parents. The “good” was taken from me, and now, that I had strengthened myself, the good was returned the very morning after I visited my father, may he live and be well.