By Rabbi David Bibi
About a year ago, a young man from the community came to me. He and his wife were struggling to conceive. He listens to my shiurim, he davens with me, and one day, he asked me for a blessing.
Now, everyone here knows me. I’m not a mekubal. I’m not known for segulot. My first instinct was: Who am I to give a brachah?
But then I remembered what Rabbi Abittan Z’SL, always taught us — even the blessing of a hedyot, of a simple person, has weight. So, I told him: I’ll have you in mind. I’ll add you to my tefillot. May Hashem bless you and your wife with children.
And then I moved on. I didn’t think much about it.
Fast forward. I’m driving my son Moses — an OB-GYN — into the city. He was quiet, thoughtful. Then he said he had a surgery scheduled the next morning: a high-risk pre-term C-section.
I had rarely heard concern in his voice. And instinctively, I said: Vihi no‘am Adonai Eloheinu aleinu, u-ma‘aseh yadeinu konenah aleinu — “May the pleasantness of Hashem be upon us, and may the work of our hands be established”. I blessed him that everything he did with his hands should be blessed. A father’s blessing to his son. And life moved on.
A week later, my son Jonah gets a call from his friend Steven: “You won’t believe this. My cousin’s wife went in for a dangerous, early C-section. The father walked into the hospital nervous... until he saw the doctor’s name: Dr. Moses Bibi. He asked, ‘Are you the son of Rabbi Bibi?’ Moses said yes.
And in that moment, all the father’s fear disappeared. Because a year earlier, he had asked me for a blessing to conceive and have a healthy child. And here was my son, delivering that child.”
And had he only known... just the night before, I had given my son a blessing with those very words.
What are the odds? Or maybe the better question is: how does Hashem weave blessing into the world?
This is exactly what Chazal meant. Blessings don’t vanish into thin air — they enter the fabric of creation.
Special Story sent to the ShabbosStories.com by Rabbi David Bibi.
