My kids and I spent lots of time patrolling our Upper East Side neighborhood this week, offering people the opportunity to do the mitzvah of lulav and etrog.
Years of experience have given me a pretty good sense of who to ask, and I’ve found that approximately 90% of Jews are happy to see us and want to do the mitzvah. There are always those, however, who are uninterested, and some who are downright hostile.
I knew we would undoubtedly encounter some who might be angry with us, and I didn’t want my kids to be disheartened, so I told them the story of Yankel* who is a regular in our shul.
On his way to work 25 years ago, Yankel was approached by two Chabad students in a mitzvah tank on the streets of downtown Manhattan. “Excuse me, sir, are you Jewish?” they asked. Not expecting to be asked so publicly, Yankel was outraged and vociferously denied his heritage. “No, I am not Jewish!”
By the time he arrived at his office, guilt had set in. Although not a practicing Jew, he still felt strongly connected to his roots and regretted telling the boys he wasn’t Jewish. Alas, what’s done was done, but the guilt continued to niggle at the back of his mind for 25 years.
When I first moved to New York, I met Yankel on the street and asked him, “Are you Jewish?” Thrilled for the opportunity to fix the mistake he had made all those years ago, he answered with a resounding, “Yes!”
And so began a beautiful relationship. I asked him if he would like to study Torah and he gave me his office number to follow up. Because it was a holiday and I couldn’t write it down, I memorized it and called him a couple of days later to set up a study date. He is now a regular at Chabad.
You never know how you will affect another person, I told my kids. Just by being visible with our lulav and etrog, we might be reminding people of their Judaism. Even if we don’t speak to them and they don’t approach us. Who knows what that might trigger in their soul? And even when we think we’ve really messed up—perhaps angered someone and distanced them even further—something good might blossom from that encounter years later, and we may never know.
Happy Sukkot!
*Name changed to protect privacy.
My two boys are 7 and 10, and I’ve been trying to educate them about the meaning of prayer and how to pray properly. Regular Shabbat services are not too long, so it’s easier, but Rosh Hashanah is an entirely different experience. To keep them motivated, I created a system of raffle tickets as an incentive, with promises of an enticing prize for the raffle winner. I was pretty generous with the tickets – I even gave them some for announcing the page numbers because that kept them engaged.
Last week I took my kids on an end-of-summer trip to Bailiwick Animal Park where they offer horse rides, a petting zoo, an elephant, parrots, and more. It’s the kind of place I love, because proximity to animals reminds me of my childhood in South Africa.