begin. And the man had no idea what I was talking about: “Bar mitzvah?! Today?! I have nothing written in my calendar.”
“What?!” I was shocked. As we soon discovered, the caterer was confused; I had ordered the food for that night – the eve of the 26th of Cheshvan, and he’d understood that it was the night after the 26th of Cheshvan – the following night.
We had a hall, a bar mitzvah bachur, hundreds of invitees, and no seudah. I davened to Hashem to help me, and I started a round of phone calls. I went from one caterer to the next, and they all repeated the same refrain: No, they did not have 200 extra portions. This was not an extra two or three portions, which one could find on the spur of the moment.
I kept trying. Hashem would certainly help me and save me from huge embarrassment. Another caterer answered. This time I tried asking if they perhaps had fifty extra portions. They answered no, of course, but several moments later they called back and told me, “We have two hundred portions for you. We’ll deliver them in a few minutes.”
I did not ask questions. Time was short, and there was work to be done. The caterer arrived on time, and the food was excellent, truly like a seudas Shlomo Hamelech, and the guests who arrived had no idea that they were eating like Am Yisrael in the midbar, who received mann from Shamayim.
At the end of the evening I asked the caterer how he’d had 200 portions for me, and why at first he said he didn’t have anything, and only afterward he informed me that he had.
The caterer explained, “When someone invites us to cater, we take down all the details – name, family, home phone number, cell phone, and, obviously, the location of the venue. But today, all that was written in the calendar was, “Moshe – sheva brachos” – just an anonymous listing. Who was Moshe? Where were the sheva brachos? I asked anyone who seemed connected to these words, and no one knew what it was all about.
“So I decided to take a risk and prepare 200 portions, because I figured it was better for us to get stuck with extra food than for someone else to get stuck with people coming and nothing to give them. We worked and prepared, and at 7 p.m., the hour when customers usually call and ask us to come, no one called. We waited a bit more, and it seemed there was no Moshe and no sheva brachos, but there was you and your bar mitzvah.
“I waited a bit longer in order to be sure no one else needed these portions, and then I called you back.”
This is the astonishing explanation behind the two hundred portions that were waiting for me. It’s amazing how Hakadosh Baruch Hu arranged our event for us in the best possible way. Here, there was a mistake with the date, so there, they prepared portions without knowing for whom, and Hakadosh Baruch Hu was saving us from a great loss and giving us everything we needed.
Our son, while becoming bar mitzvah, was zocheh to gain a living lesson in emunah.
