One evening I was sitting and learning in the beis medrash as usual, when suddenly a Yid came over to me and said, “Come quickly.”
I went over to him. “What is so urgent?”
“Come with me to my car – it’ll be worth your while,” he told me.
“We’re going to the bakery now,” the Yid explained. “Every Monday night, the owner of the bakery takes out all the left-overs. I have an arrangement with him that I distribute all the leftover baked goods, and this time, when I saw you sitting there and learning, I thought it was appropriate to give some of them to you. They’re really worth it – all types of special breads and rolls.”
This whole episode seemed strange to me. How was it that one fine evening someone decided that specifically I needed to get fresh loaves of bread from the bakery, and why was it suddenly so urgent? But these questions would not stop me from enjoying the tasty rolls and long dark baguettes.
I checked and saw that the bakery had an excellent hechsher, and I took the pack of rolls and baguettes. This Yid also brought me back to the shul, where I continued learning until the end of the seder, and only afterward did I go home with the bag of baked goods.
It will be nice to surprise the children, I thought. They would certainly ask me what I had in the bag and would enjoy discovering the rolls that they could take to school. But the minute I opened the door of my home, right after a heartfelt greeting, they asked me, “Abba, right you brought us baguettes?”
“How do you know?” I asked in amazement.
“Because we davened for it!”
They kept interrupting one another excitedly until I got the full, amazing story: My daughter is learning photography, and for one of her projects, she very much wanted to have a real baguette for the following day in order to take a picture of a baby holding a baguette.
It isn’t clear to me why this specific baguette was zocheh, and to my good fortune, I was not asked to express an opinion on the matter. In our home, we usually don’t buy things we don’t really need, and it seemed like buying the baguette merely for a picture would not have justified the expense. My daughter had told her siblings, “Come, let’s all daven that Hashem should send us a baguette without our having to buy it. He should simply send it to us.”
She started to daven, and all her brothers and sisters davened for her as well.
And because this was a genuine tefillah from the depths of her heart, Hashem sent her the baguette, and everyone earned, on the way, delicious baguettes for their morning meal in school.
