“Listen,” I told my friend over the phone, while pacing my small apartment. A minute later he did not have anything to listen to, because the phone slipped out of my hand and into a pail of water.
It was totally unexpected. My wife was preparing to wash the floor for Shabbos, and I was taking care of other routine things. I am so used to walking the house while I talk, and my right hand serves me well in holding the phone to my ear. How strange that the phone not only fell, but had a fatal fall that ended its life.
I had to buy a new cell phone, hoping that Hashem would reimburse us for the loss. But the routine did not return to our home. In retrospect, I felt as though I had fallen into a dark tunnel where unexpected things kept happening. Suddenly, I got an urgent call to come home because the floor was flooded with water. I came home to calm my wife and to search for the source of the problem, but I could not grasp what was going on. The plumber we called urgently informed us that a pipe had burst.
Then there was a leak from the neighbors, and on an average day, drops of water dripped onto my hat. My wife complained that the faucet was dripping, and I lifted my eyes to the Heavens. From where would my help come?
I asked Hashem to help me reveal the meaning behind what had been happening to me in recent weeks. Why were we suffering so much totally unnatural harm through water? And then, Hashem inspired me to check the mezuzos.
To our amazement, we discovered a problem in the mezuzah exactly on a word related to water. It was the word yoreh (rain), where the letter vav had partially faded, so the word seemed to say yarah.
We replaced that mezuzah, and baruch Hashem, since then our water has been flowing properly.
