I picked up a chariedi Jew, and he asked me not to take another female passenger along the way, because of tznius. “You won’t lose anything,” he told me. “Parnassah is miShamayim.”
I rolled the words around on my tongue – “Parnassah is miShamayim.” I sat in the car and stopped near the crosswalk. I had time to think and to talk to Hashem, and I said to Him, “Abba, show me that parnassah is really miShamayim!” I asked for this with my whole heart. I wanted to feel that He was there.
Several days passed, and on Thursday I got a message from my company: “Who wants to go to the bakery to bring bourekas? You’ll get paid, and you’ll also get bourekas.” I took the job and set out. When I got to the bakery I opened the taxi door, left the keys inside, and went in for a moment to bring the bourekas back to the car. I got back to the sidewalk with the bourekas and...Help! No car in sight! They had stolen my car! And it’s not even my car! It’s worth 70,000 shekels! From where would I pay that? You must understand, I don’t have another source of income, just this car and the jobs I do in it. You know what it means when they say “the source of his bread fell apart”? That’s exactly what happened to me, except that I was left with the “bread” – the bourekas – in my hands...
So, to make a long story short, I called the owner of the taxi to tell him what happened, and he told me, “If the keys were inside, then no one will pay for it. It’s all your responsibility.” The police came, took down details, and took me to the station. I sat there for three-quarters of an hour without knowing why I was there and what I was waiting for, and then the police chief came in and pointed his finger upward. “Someone in Heaven loves you,” the chief said. “I’ve been working here for twenty years, and it has never happened before that within three-quarters of an hour a stolen car comes back.”
He motioned to me to follow him outside, and I saw the taxi. Whole. In some corner of the car I had hidden 500 shekels, and that money was still there too. Everything came back safe and whole. Hashem had shown me that parnassah was from Shamayim!
The driver finished his story, and I was very excited about it. And one time, when I had an opportunity to inspire Yidden on Chanukah, I repeated the story of the taxi driver and his car, emphasizing that, “If Hakadosh Baruch Hu had brought him the money in some special way, the driver would have realized that parnassah comes both from work and from Shamayim, but when Hakadosh Baruch Hu took away his car and then gave it back to him, he saw tangibly that all of parnassah is only from Shamayim!”
Two years passed after I gave that talk, and one of the listeners told me he’d identified the driver from the story, and once he traveled with him and asked him, “If Hakadosh Baruch Hu had brought you money in some special way, would you not have understood that parnassah is miShamayim?”
“I think not,” the driver responded. “I would’ve thought that parnassah could come from all different places, but when Hashem took away my car and then gave it back to me, He showed me that only He gives everything. He can take, and He can return, and all of parnassah is only from Shamayim!”
