I am a Yid from London. It was on Erev Pesach 5756 – quite some time ago – when I was twelve and a half. We would clean the house well, and then we would wait to go out shopping. In our house we knew that if we wanted something new, we’d have to wait for Pesach. Then you get everything – shoes, clothing, kippah, tzitzis, and a suit. Games – not for everyone, but nonetheless, a new game was one of the things we’d buy before Pesach. As children, this was a special experience for us, and we waited anxiously for our parents to call us and say that it was time to go to the store.
We dared not ask.
In truth, even if we could ask, that year we knew that asking wouldn’t help. I was a very curious boy, and despite the strict chinuch of our home, I had my ways of understanding things. I understood that the financial situation in the house was difficult. It seemed my parents were scraping the bottom of the barrel just in order to provide our basic needs. How would they be able to buy everything we needed for Pesach?
We were advancing nicely with the cleaning. My father took out several cartons of old documents and decided it was time to throw them out. He asked his accountant if it was okay to get rid of them, and the accountant said, “Generally, British law is that you should hold on to these documents for seven years, but you can always say you didn’t know there was such a law. But...you asked me nothing and you don’t know about the law.”
My father decided he would throw out the documents, but he wanted to keep the loose-leaf binder and the folders, as they were in good condition and could be used again. “Michel,” Abba called to me, “can you please take the documents out of the folders?”
I was happy to do so. I enjoy such jobs. I could peek at the documents and see all sorts of interesting things, and I also like to deal with papers and files. It was just the job for me.
I sat down near the cartons and started working. There were orders for merchandise, deliveries, dates. Nothing interesting there. Another file, another folder, and suddenly I saw a banknote sticking out of one of the folders. I leafed through the file and discovered it was filled with banknotes of various denominations. I counted them and discovered that there were 800 pounds there!
That is a really large sum.
I was very excited. I called my sister and told her, “I think we’ll be able to go out shopping today. Look what I found.”
She was just as excited as I was. We went upstairs to our parents’ room together. I could hear Abba and Ima talking. Ima was saying, “We need shoes for Michel, Shima’le, and Raizy. We need new socks for everyone. And what about wine and matzos?”
“Yes, yes, it’s all really important,” Abba said. I’m breaking my head trying to figure out where we’ll get the money for all these things.”
At that moment I wanted to burst into the room with the 800 pounds, but I was a product of my British chinuch, and I would not dare to do so.
I stood outside and knocked on the door until I was give permission to enter.
“What do you need?” my father asked.
I said nothing, but simply showed my father the money.
He was amazed. “What’s this? Where is it from?”
“I found it in one of the folders you asked me to empty out.”
My father got emotional. “Hodu laHashem ki tov!” and he immediately started giving instructions. “Take it and go buy shoes, clothing, and everything you need.” The revachah had come in one shot. He even gave each of us pocket money.
When the excitement died down, my father remembered where the money had come from.
Ten years earlier, my father had owned a fish store. He would order merchandise from a fish vendor in the marketplace, who would bring the fish late at night, when my father wasn’t there to pay him. So Abba would prepare the money to give him and would leave it in a folder on the counter, and the vendor would take the money himself. During the final week before the shop closed, Abba prepared the money in the folder, but ultimately he didn’t order the fish. The vendor never came, and the money remained. Eventually, the folder with the money was put into a carton with other folders, and now, when my father asked me to empty it, the treasure was revealed.
It was amazing to realize that Hakadosh Baruch Hu had watched over our money for that Erev Pesach, when Abba was in a real pinch, and He had arranged that Abba would want to throw out the cartons and receive the advice that he should pretend that he knew nothing about the law regarding keeping documents for seven years.
Baruch Hashem, our Pesach needs were amply met.
