It was thursday afternoon. Shabbos preparations were well under way when suddenly my son came in crying bitterly. “What happened?” I asked him.
“My tooth hurts,” he cried to me.
Everything stopped, and my wife started calling dental clinics, asking them for an emergency appointment for a first-aid treatment for my son.
In the first clinic they said there was no chance of fitting her in between appointments, in the second clinic they were not taking anyone, the third one had already closed, and the fourth would not open until later. In the fifth clinic, the dentist herself picked up the phone, but she said she’d already finished working and had gone home.
And in the background – crying. The boy was in pain, suffering, crying, crying...the tears alone could make a person go crazy.
After that last phone call, my wife suddenly received a call from a woman she didn’t know. “Your sister sent me to you,” the woman said. “She said you would know where I could get secondhand clothing.”
“Secondhand clothing? My wife could barely recall her own name with all the crying from my son, so she really had to strain to recall details. But she answered patiently. The woman on the other end asked a few more questions, and my wife answered those as well.
It sounded like some sort of choir. A child crying, the mother stroking him and talking on the phone, the whimper dying down and then getting stronger again, and once again the mother saying something softly. Instead of telling the woman on the line that it was impossible for her to talk this way, my wife continued answering her detailed questions as best she could.
“Who’s crying so much?” the woman finally asked my wife, and my wife told her about our son’s terrible toothache and the relentless crying.
“Listen to me,” the woman said. “Put salt into the cavity in the tooth, and you’ll see that the pain will pass!”
The conversation concluded, the salt was put into the tooth, and indeed – it was amazing. The pain stopped! The child stopped crying, and peace returned to our home even before we found a dentist who agreed to meet our son.
We saw how, in the merit of my wife’s patience and desire to help a bas Yisrael, the yeshuah came.
