My name is Yisrael, and I live in Yerushalayim. In the past, you wrote here in the newsletter that you could fill an entire book with stories about washing machines: how they broke down at the most complicated times, and how things worked out with amazing hashgachah. Now I’m suggesting an idea for the second book in the series – a book about refrigerators.
It happened on the Wednesday between Yom Kippur and Sukkos. Since our refrigerator was suddenly suspiciously quiet, and the food we had placed in it emerged at the same warm temperature as before, we understood that the fridge had died.
At that point we still hadn’t made peace with the situation, and we tried to get hold of a technician to bring it back to life, even if only for a short while, for tomorrow was Shabbos, and Yom Tov was coming soon, and we had to find a place to store all the food we had prepared in honor of Yom Tov.
It seemed that this pressured time, between Yom Kippur and Sukkos, was good timing for all the technicians. Everyone was busy with a million details dictated by the calendar, and they could not give us even a few minutes of their time. All the technicians repeated the same line: “I’m on overload.” They would not agree to grace my overloaded refrigerator with even a glance.
The truth is that our refrigerator is not exactly new and, relative to the lifespan of appliances nowadays, you could say it is definitely old. The idea of buying a new refrigerator was certainly a reasonable one, but before I checked how much money I had for this major purchase, I first checked to see who would be willing to sell me a refrigerator and bring it to my home immediately. I made some inquiries and discovered that most of the stores deliver within a minimum of three days. My friend, one of those whom I asked, urged me to go to a specific store. “I’m telling you, they have a refrigerator available in stock, but go right away!”
I went immediately. Down the steps, out of the building, and...right there before my eyes in the parking lot stood a refrigerator that made a really good impression on me. I inquired about its source, and I found out that one of the neighbors had had it in his storage room for a long time and now, before Sukkos, he decided to get rid of it. With his permission I took the refrigerator up to my home, examined it, and discovered that it works perfectly.
The refrigerator had sat in my neighbor’s storage room waiting for the exact moment when I would need it to fulfill its task in the world and be filled with all the goodies in honor of Shabbos and Yom Tov!
