Chanukah of 5785 was approaching, and Dovid had no idea how he was going to light the Chanukah candles. He was in Tennessee with his child who needed medical treatment, and the hospital didn’t allow lighting any kind of fire on the premises.
After a long discussion with the hospital manager, the manager agreed to let Dovid light the candles in a glass case at the front door of the facility. “As a onetime allowance, I’ll let you to light at the front door. However, you must stand guard there as long as it is lit.”
“Great!” Dovid thought. He had a way to light in the hospital, but where was he going to find such a case? He tried Home Depot and other local stores, but nobody in Tennessee even knew of such an item, let alone to carry it.
Several days later, he was in the local Young Israel, and he saw a glass menorah case lying on the bima. He walked up to the bima and inquired people there as to whose menorah it was.
“You want it?” one of the senior men there asked Dovid. “You can have it.”
Dovid was delighted to hear that he had found the glass case he needed. With it, he would not only fulfill the mitzvah but would lighten up the dark streets of Tennessee with his Chanukah menorah.
The next day, Dovid returned to the Young Israel and approached the donor to thank him again, who told him the story behind the mysterious case.
The man told Dovid that his wife had been nudging him to get rid the menorah. For years, it had been collecting dust without anybody touching it. Yesterday, as his wife was rearranging the garage, she’d said, “Enough is enough. It’s going in the garbage right now!”
“I’ll bring it to shul,” he compromised. “If no one wants it, then it’ll get discarded.”
“Thirty seconds before I was ready to cast it into the dumpster,” the man told Dovid, “you asked me if you could have it. Now I know why I was saving it. It was stored in my garage all these years so that one day, when there would be a Yid who would need to light the menorah with it here in Tennessee, it would be ready for him.”
For years, Hashem had arranged the menorah case so that Dovid would be able to do pirsumei nisa in the streets of Tennessee.
