A Yid from Ashdod relates: Each day, my wife travels about an hour to get to work in another city. As time went on this became more and more difficult. It is a long, tiring trip, and the children wait for her to get home. We found ourselves hoping for a yeshuah, that she would find work close to home.
“You might think that in Ashdod they don’t need workers like me,” my wife repeated again and again. “Clearly, there is a need for my line of work here. We just need to find the office that needs me.”
“We just need to find” means to search, which implies running after every shred of information. From the moment we decided to look for work locally, we were preoccupied looking through every pamphlet, newspaper, and local advertorial we could find. We were always the first to bring these things up to our home and check – perhaps there was some good news here? Maybe there was someone who specifically needed us?
This became part of our daily routine. Every Motzaei Shabbos several advertorials are distributed in all the mailboxes, another two come midweek, and there are also those that show up in our mailboxes on Thursday, and each time, obsessed, we would run to look through them and to see if any appropriate jobs were advertised there. Obviously, we would also look through the daily paper carefully. From time to time we would see offices looking for someone to work in my wife’s field, and she would immediately send in her resume.
All in all, we sent resumes to twenty different workplaces! Of those, four got back to us, and they all said, each in his own way, that it was not relevant.
One day, very late at night, we knew that one of the local advertorials had already arrived and we hadn’t yet looked through it. I was already very tired, and I said, “I think that to go down now just in order to get the paper is unnecessary hishtadlus. It’s too much. If Hakadosh Baruch Hu wants to give you work in Ashdod, it will come without the major effort demanded of us now to get the paper and read through it.
That was it. We went to sleep without looking through the paper. We dared to do this!
The next morning my wife got a phone call from her friend. This friend had seen the previous day’s paper and saw an ad regarding a job that seemed perfectly suitable for my wife. We sent in a resume, and immediately after we sent the fax they called us. They wanted her to come for an interview, and ultimately she was hired there. Today she works in a job that suits her in our city, with no need for long, tiring travel time.
We saw how, min haShamayim, Hashem arranged this work for her, and it was specifically when we let go of our hishtadlus, specifically when we stopped the ceaseless runaround and cast our burden completely on Hashem.
