Mr. and Mrs. Benny Fishoff were once sitting in a Miami restaurant with their dear friends, Reb Eliyahu and Miri Abramczyk. Reb Eliyahu noticed Mr. Fishoff chatting quietly with the waitress, then handing her a slip of paper.
“Did you give her a kvittel?” Reb Eliyahu joked.
Mr. Fishoff smiled, but his expression was serious. He explained that he had greeted the woman and, after asking where she was from, he learned that she was a baalas teshuvah who did not have a husband, raising her daughter on her own.
“Then I asked how the daughter was managing and she looked concerned and told me that the girl is becoming bas mitzvah. I thought that maybe she has to celebrate, to make some sort of party, so I gave her a check just to help a little.”
“How much was the check?” asked Reb Eliyahu.
“Two thousand dollars,” Mr. Fishoff replied.
“Benny, do you know her from before?” asked Reb Eliyahu in surprise.
“I don’t,” Mr. Fishoff conceded, “but this I do know. She needs help and I am able to help.”
The waitress eventually moved up in the ranks and became a manager at a more prominent Miami restaurant. Until the end of Mr. Fishoff’s life, whenever this woman saw Reb Eliyahu or his wife, she would approach and ask how Mr. Fishoff was doing. “I say Tehillim for that man every day,” she would say.
Reprinted from the Parshas Vayeitzei 5784 edition of At the ArtScroll Shabbos Table. Excerpted from the ArtScroll book – “B’ahavah, Benny – Reb Yechiel Benzion Fishoff” by Yisroel Besser.
