by Rabbi Helman
One day this week I was driving down Shaker Blvd. on my way to the JFX office, when up ahead I noticed a car pull over to the side of the road and someone bolt across the street. I started to slow down to see if everything was OK, wondering what was going on, considering there wasn't anything on the other side of Shaker Blvd. besides trees. As I got closer I noticed it was a JFX mom, who had run across the street to move a huge tree branch that was sticking out into the road.
To the JFX mom,
Seeing this act of kindness really inspired me. It was cold and rainy outside and the grass was all muddy but that didn't stop you from doing this chessed - act of kindness. It was chessed at its purest. You didn't think anyone noticed, you weren't getting any reward for this but still you went ahead in the cold and rain to prevent other cars from getting scratched.
Recently someone asked me a great question. Why was it Abraham who was the first person in the world to notice that all these idols were false and that there must be a G-D who created the world? Weren't there so many great people that lived before Abraham?
The answer might be, we know that each one of the forefathers had a certain trait (middah) through which they served God. Abraham's was chessed - kindness. There is a Talmudic teaching that God said, "A world of kindness I have built." This teaches us to stop and realize that everything that we have is a kindness from God, and the way to repay that kindness is by being kind and doing acts of chessed for others. So Abraham, whose middah was chessed and who was constantly looking to help others, realized that everything he had was coming from somewhere and nothing happened by chance. Possibly, this is how Abraham discovered Hashem.
I was wondering why I did happen to see this story unfold. I don't usually go that way to the office, and to top it off I already had left my house once but halfway to the office I had to turn around and go back to get something, and that's when I saw this story happen.
These days we're bombarded by the media with so many stories about people acting so uncaring..... stories of people pepper spraying and beating each other up to be the first shopper on black Friday.... protests and vandalism. I felt I should share this story with you to show that there's still goodness out there. It may not make headlines, but in the JFX Email, it does.
