Every tzarah (distress) that comes on a person is a besurah tovah; every misfortune is a treasure chest. And to a great extent we do say that; we see it again and again. Like the man whose business was torpedoed.
A true story – a man in my shul. He took a big order from a Stop and Shop store, a chain store. And he didn’t know that this store was already a customer of someone else, someone in the mafia. By accident he took away a customer from the Italian mafia and so they came the next night and they firebombed his store. He’s out of a job now. And he thought he was ruined. He was finished.
But the truth is that the business was breaking his health. His nerves were frayed and his heart was sick – he was sacrificing his life for the store. But now nothing was left so he went out of that business, and he went and got another job; a nine-to-five city job where his health was maintained.
And he had time even to start learning. The man never learned Gemara before but as a result of the firebombing, he finally started learning Gemara. He became a talmid chacham, a shtikel lamdan too.
There are all kinds of ways that misfortunes turn out to be good later in life. What about that beautiful girl who was engaged to a doctor and everybody was so happy? It was sasson v’simchah, the culmination of the dreams of her family, that the daughter should marry a doctor.
And then the engagement was broken. His mother interfered and he called it off. Oh, you could imagine the tragedy in her home. A yelalah went out, an outcry. “Oy yoy yoy!” The family was sitting shivah. They had lost that golden shidduch. But I know that this doctor happened to be a bum. I knew him. He was a very modern man and a bum too and it was going to be trouble for her.
And soon after the broken engagement there came along a wonderful young man, a frumme ben Torah who was making a good living in computers. It was a wonderful match! As a result of the ‘tragedy’ she was married to somebody else who was ten times as good and they lived happily ever after. She was saved from the doctor by this tragedy for which they were sitting shivah.
Of course, I'm not recommending breaking engagements, but many times in life we see tzaros have a benefit in this world. And looking back we see it was a stroke of good luck, that nothing better could have happened.
From Tragedy to Treasure
I recall a case of a kollel man, a ben Torah, with a beard, a frum young man, and he happened to be in a certain place where gentile boys came and annoyed him outside the door, outside the window. They were banging on the window and disturbing him. This kollel man happened to be a husky fellow and hot tempered, the very strong type, so he ran out with the intention of doing something to them and they fled. And as he was pursuing them, he tripped on the concrete and he fell down and broke both of his arms!
I happened to meet him subsequently – I visited him and both his arms were in casts – and I told him it's a stroke of good luck for him. Because he would have beaten them up and then their big brothers or their fathers would have come. And they might come with a weapon! So, he got off easy, this fellow. The breaking of both arms, that's the way that he was prevented from getting into trouble.
If we study, if we look back, on very many of the misfortunes in our lives, we will see that they were blessings sent to prevent some later misfortune. There was a woman in our kehillah who crashed her car; she had a smash-up and so she had to go to the hospital for a checkup. And the physician discovered there was a lump on her breast and so they quickly made an operation and she's still alive; it's twenty years and she's well.
Now, I don't know if she realizes what a great blessing that crash was. Had it not happened, she would have perhaps postponed until it would have been past the time of healing. If someone had said “Mrs. so and so, what about going for a checkup?” she wouldn’t have listened. Had she received a letter or maybe some friend would have told her, “Let's go,” so she would have postponed. She never would have found it until it would have been too late. When , Hakadosh Baruch Hu sent her the letter, the tzarah, she responded and she was saved.
Such things happen again and again. These stories are in the thousands only that we're lazy about thinking; we’re not accustomed to looking back and seeing how Hakadosh Baruch Hu is rescuing us and helping us.
Reprinted from the Parshas Tazria-Metzora 5785 email of Toras Avigdor.
