MY MIRACLE NEEDS A MIRACLE
MR. JAY GOLDSTEIN
Back in the early ‘80s, I owned a bookbinding business in New York and had a few regular Chabad customers. They would tell me about their Rebbe, and around Passover time, they told me about a special gathering he would have before the holiday which they invited me to join.
I went, and I was very impressed. There were a lot of people there, and the Rebbe sat at a long dais in the center of a cavernous room. There were some prominent Jewish leaders in attendance as well as some local politicians, some of whom were not Jewish.
The Rebbe spoke in Yiddish, but I was given a transistor radio that could play in my ear a simultaneous English translation of what he was saying. Every once in a while, shot glasses with wine were passed around and when the Rebbe was between talks, everyone would say l’chaim. You would hold up your cup, and the Rebbe would give you a toast. At one point, I made eye contact with him, he smiled, and I made a l’chaim.
It would be a long time before I had a real face-to-face with the Rebbe. In the meantime, in 1983, I married my wife Rebecca. We wanted to have a child, but it wasn’t happening. After a while, we began going to fertility clinics and trying out different medicines. When that didn’t work, we became a little discouraged.
“It’s not so bad,” my sister told me. “You can adopt.”
Well, one day in 1989, I was watching TV in the living room with Becky, when out of nowhere she said, “Jay, I want to go to the Rebbe to get a blessing. Maybe he can help us.”
I hadn’t seen the Rebbe since that gathering, and had never actually met him, but I knew that he received people every Sunday. You could go tell him what your problem was and he would give you a blessing.
We got there the next Sunday to find, much to my amazement, a long line of people extending down Eastern Parkway for as far as the eye could see. Standing on that line, we found people from Europe, South America, and Australia. They were from all walks of life — some weren’t even Jewish — but they had all heard about the Rebbe and wanted to speak to him.
After a long wait, we entered 770. Women went one way, and men the other, and soon it was my turn.
“My wife and I want to have a child, but it’s not happening,” I told the Rebbe. He listened, gave me a blessing and handed me a dollar to give to charity while saying, “This is for your wife.”
I thanked him and walked off with the dollar, when one of the bodyguards called out, “You, you, you!”
“Me?” I asked, turning around.
“Yes, you! The Rebbe wants to speak to you again.”
I was a little nervous, but I went back to the Rebbe. The Rebbe looked at me, and he seemed very excited, almost
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