As a young man, I [Ami Pykovski] ran a clothing business in Los Angeles, in a prime garment district location - on the corner of South Los Angeles Street and Pico Boulevard. I was early in my journey to Judaism, and my store was open on Shabbat. On a typical Saturday, I would make 5,000-15,000 dollars, a significant portion of the weekly sales.
I very much desired to close on Shabbat, but I calculated that if I did, I would lose about $20,000 to 60,000 a month. After a lot of thought, I decided to close on Saturday. However, although the store would be closed on Saturday, I planned on working until late on Friday nights.
I wrote to the Lubavitcher Rebbe about my decision to close the business on Shabbat without saying anything about Friday night. The Rebbe's answer was, "Start from before sunset, and great is your merit to joyously spread Judaism" (he underlined the word "joyously"). The Rebbe also enclosed 18 dollars and wrote that I should give them to charity locally—a bill of ten, a bill of five, a bill of two, and a bill of one.
Now it was clear: the business would be closed the entire Shabbat. But to do so, I had to break the lease with the landlord for the space I rented for my store. It was a vast area spread out over an entire block, so the cost of cancelling the ten-year lease was enormous. I tried convincing friends to buy the lease from me, but nobody wanted to. When I saw that I had no option, I decided to inform the landlord that I was breaking the lease.
When I went to his office, I was told he wasn't there. When I returned to the store, a businessman I did not know walked in and said he wanted to buy the property. "I'm not the owner," I said. You must talk to the landlord."
"I already spoke to the landlord," he responded, "and he is ready to sell, but he said that you hold the lease. This is why I am here - to buy you out."
Suddenly, I realised I had the upper hand. I started thinking hard about how much to ask of him for breaking the contract. However, before I could say a word, he offered me an amount much more than I would have dared to ask for. We signed an agreement, and I evacuated the premises.
With the money I received for our arrangement, I bought a building and established a clothing factory, something I never would have dreamed I could do. In the normal course of things, I would have had to work for decades in order to achieve such a thing. Yet, the Rebbe had shortened the way for me. It was all in the merit of my decision to keep Shabbat.
Here is another example of how I saw unimaginable success after I decided to keep Shabbat. I had an offer to open a chain of stores called Indian Head in Los Angeles, but I decided not to get involved in retail so I wouldn't have to work on Shabbat. Instead, I decided to invest in clothing manufacturing and offer it to Macy's.
When I went to the buyer, she thought I would show her dozens of styles, as expected from companies that do business with Macy's. I came with just one style. She was very surprised that I had brought just one style. She said that because I had the guts to do so, she was eager to work with me and placed an order worth $25,000.
That was the first time I had worked with a company on such a large scale, and I was very excited. But when the clothing came from the dyeing process, I was devastated. They had mixed up the colours and every pair of pants came out in a different colour.
When I saw this, I began to cry. I was sure I had lost all my money—a large amount in those days—and the opportunity to work with Macy's.
After vacillating, I decided to send them the merchandise anyway. I left the office for two weeks, afraid of the angry phone calls I was sure to receive.
Sure enough, upon my return, I found dozens of messages from the company on my answering machine. But just then, my phone rang, and the Macy's rep was on the line. "I've been looking for you for two weeks,' she said. 'Your pants were incredibly successful. They are completely sold out!"
* * *
In my youth, I was a promising professional soccer player in Israel. Over the years, I used my connections with friends in the world of soccer to spread Judaism. On one of my visits to Israel, I met with my former soccer trainer, David Shweitzer, with whom I was very close. He asked me jokingly who would advocate for him when he went to heaven after 120 years. I told him, "When you get up there, tell them you are Pykovski's friend, and they'll take good care of you."
The next day, I got a phone call from a friend who said that David had just died! I was shocked! I thought to myself, "How can I keep my promise to him from yesterday, the day before he died?" I decided to write a Torah in his merit.
When the Torah was completed, except for the last few rows of letters, we brought it to the Chabad yeshiva in Ramat Aviv. The finishing of it was spectacular. We wrote the last letters on the soccer field where David Shweitzer had served as a trainer.
The then Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Yisrael-Meir Lau, attended the event. He said that he had participated in hundreds of such events in his life. Yet, he had never experienced a moving one such as this one, with the soccer players on the field in uniform together with Jews from all sorts of backgrounds writing letters in the Torah.
* * *
On one of my business trips to the Far East, I spent Shabbat at Chabad in Bangkok, Thailand, with one of the Rebbe's emissaries there, Rabbi Nechemia Wilhelm. A few dozen young people attended the Shabbat meal. I announced that I would give tefillin as a gift to whoever committed to wearing them regularly.
A young Israeli sat next to me. He wore the red robes of the local idol worshipers and looked like a Thai monk. He raised his hand and said he committed to putting on tefillin. I was shocked, but I kept my word and sent him tefillin.
Two years later, I was visiting Israel and spent a day studying in the Chabad yeshiva in Ramat Aviv. A young man approached me and asked me whether I recognized him. I said he must be mistaken since we had never met before, but he insisted we knew one another. He brought me his tefillin and said that he was the fellow from Thailand to whom I had given tefillin, and now he was studying in yeshiva!
Source: AscentofSafed.com
Biographic note:
Ami Pykovski is a successful businessman and a former professional soccer player who played for 36 years in Los Angeles and for the Israeli soccer team. Today, he serves the religious needs of soccer players and is a very familiar face for Israeli soccer fans. He once lit a menorah for 30,000 spectators at a Beitar match in Jerusalem.
