Power Issues
Last week was a rough week. On Tuesday night a powerful thunderstorm burst through our neighborhood knocking out power to thousands of residents.
Having experienced countless power outages throughout my lifetime I figured this would be no big deal. The outages usually take only a few hours before power is restored. The Illuminating Company told people power would be restored by 6 am the latest. Although I had a very uncomfortable night due to the heat I was able to tolerate the situation, comforting myself with the thought that it would end soon enough.
I had a sleepless Tuesday night and woke up sweaty, tired and grumpy when I saw the power was still off. We called the Illuminating Company only to be told it would be noon before the power came back. Noon came and went, still no power. Now we were told 6 pm. I started to worry about the contents of my two freezers and two other refrigerators, all of which we had been stocking for the past few months in anticipation of our upcoming daughter’s wedding and its accompanying celebration.
Further exacerbating the situation was the fact that this was turning into the hottest and most humid couple of days we had experienced the entire summer. Topping off the matter was the fact that we were in the middle of a period known in the Jewish calendar as “The Nine Days,” a stretch of nine days that go through the holiday of Tisha B’av and are the saddest days of the year. In keeping with the spirit of the time we refrain from certain activities such as swimming and eating meat. This meant I couldn’t even pack up the family into a car with a grill and some hot dogs and move into a hotel for a mini-vacation.
Wednesday came and went and we were forced to spend another hot and miserable night in the dark even though by that time many residents in my neighborhood had power.
Every few hours we called the company for update which kept getting pushed off later and later until they finally stopped giving us a predicted time.
By Thursday I had to move my freezers to my uncle who lives across the street and had his power back on. Schlepping large freezers in 90 degrees and near 100 percent humidity did nothing to improve my mood!
With Shabbos approaching we moved into my sister’s house. While we no longer felt the same sense of urgency to get our electricity back, we still were anxious to get back home and get back to normal. By the time we sat down to our Friday night dinner we pretty much forgot about the situation figuring that by then we couldn’t move back into our house until after Shabbos anyways.
On Shabbos morning at 7:30, 80 hours after losing power, the electricity came back on! There were several lessons I took from this episode, made all the more impactful by the timing of it all.
- We take too many things for granted in life, particularly things that are a constant in our lives. I am sure none of us pay attention to the fact that we are blessed to always have electricity providing us light, power and air conditioning. That is, until we lose it and realizes how large a role it plays in our lives. The same is true with all of life’s blessings such as family, friends, health, wealth etc – we usually don’t appreciate what we have until it is taken from us. Let’s not forget all that G-d has blessed us with!
- The Nine Days commemorates the destruction of the two Temples, a place where G-d rested His divine presence in this world more acutely than anywhere else on earth. When G-d allowed our enemies to destroy His Temple He not only sent us out of our homeland into exile but He also went “into exile,” as it were. The Talmud teaches us that the pain G-d feels on a daily basis over having to “leave His home and sending us out of our home” is indescribable. Having been forced to leave my home specifically during the Nine Days gave me a tiny feeling of the distress I should be feeling as a Jew. If the small inconvenience of no air conditioning and lights for a few days is so distressing to me, how much more so is G-d’s pain over His (and our) exile from the Temple and Israel!
- Although it felt the end may never come, I knew that eventually it would. In fact, it was precisely when I practically “gave up” and stopped letting the frustrations get the better of me that the salvation came.
The Talmud tells us that a Jew must believe that G-d will one day bring us the Messiah and our ultimate redemption. Although it has been nearly 2,000 years and it is easy to give up hope we are commanded to keep the faith. Eventually G-d will return us to our home, He will once again reside in His home and He will “turn on the lights” for us for all eternity as the prophet tells us “A new light will shine upon Zion.” May it happen speedily in our days!
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Yosef Koval
