A Yid from Haifa relates:
It was just after Yom Kippur, and my new kaballah was being diligently fulfilled with a sense of freshness and renewal: reciting Krias Shema al hamittah with a head covering and an outer jacket, and reading it from a siddur.
While I was used to the first part of the kaballah, the second part about using a siddur was new to me. Here I needed a great deal of strength. The wording for Krias Shema before sleep is not printed in every siddur. Many Shabbos siddurim do not print it, and machzorim surely do not. When we’re talking about seasons of Yamim Tovim, when there is more Shabbos and Yom Tov than weekdays, it turns out that saying Krias Shema from a siddur will often require a few moments’ of searching and leafing through pages.
On Chol Hamoed Sukkos I headed to bed in the sukkah, which is downstairs in our courtyard. I wore a caftan and shtreimel, as is our minhag, and I wanted to say Krias Shema in the sukkah. Only when I came downstairs did I recall that I did not have a siddur from which to read the words, and I had taken a kaballah on myself!
I was not so wide awake anymore, and the steps up to my house seemed like a mountain to me. But despite the heaviness and tiredness I was feeling, I went up the stairs, got a siddur from the bookcase, and said Krias Shema.
Since I was already home, I put the shtreimel in its special box and went back to the sukkah to sleep.
In the morning, big drops of rain woke me up. The rain was so strong that the whole sukkah was filled with water.
The expensive shtreimel, which had almost rested at my side in the sukkah that night, was not there. And if it had filled with water – I prefer not to imagine how it would look, and how I would have dealt with such damage to it.
But b’chasdei Hashem, it was safe at home, in the zechus of my kaballah.
