Wedding of the 15th child

This past Tuesday night I attended a very special and most unique wedding of Moishy Lew to Chavee Rosenblum. What made it so special was the fact that it was my wife’s brother’s wedding, but it was unique because my parents-in-law married off their fifteenth child, Moishy. The oldest sibling, Yossi, is 47 years old and is himself a father of ten kids as well as a grandfather. He was just twenty three when his baby brother was born. You can imagine taking the family picture at the wedding - it was a tremendous ordeal as we had to get over 130 immediate family members together!

During the wedding my father-in-law, Rabbi Shmuel Lew, shared the following story.

On the 5th of Elul 5747/1987, he spontaneously joined the line to receive a dollar from the Rebbe. His eldest daughter Chaya, was then in the process of dating and he was tormented as to how he should be guiding his child, what he should say to her and which direction he should steer her in. Finally, after an hour and a half wait, he stood before the Rebbe and was handed a dollar accompanied by the standard blessing of “blessing and success”. The Rebbe then called him back after he had left and added, “G-d should help that you should merit good matches and excellent partners for all your children.” And indeed, his greatest blessing from G-d is his kids, and even more so his kids’ spouses!

My father-in-law says that during the years of his children dating there were some difficult moments when he didn’t know if they would find the right spouse. There were times where he thought that perhaps he wasn’t worthy of this special blessing given by the Rebbe. (I wonder how strong his doubts were when I was dating his twelfth child!) His wife was adamant in her faith in the Rebbe’s blessing. This last wedding was the closing of a circle- the Rebbe's blessing was fulfilled with the marriage of his youngest child.

I looked at the faces of my dear parents-in-law during the wedding and I could see that they were the happiest people in the world. Money can buy a lot of things. It can buy luxury cars and state-of-the-art houses but no amount can purchase the nachas and joy that they felt during the wedding. It’s time that we idolized such people instead of the empty society around us. As somebody put it at the wedding, “I would give away all the money that I have to be able to have such a family.” As a beautiful conclusion to the Rebbe’s wonderful blessing, a friend of my father-in-law blessed him that he should merit to dance at the weddings of each of his grandchildren...

The message that I learned that night is to simply have faith in our dear G-d. Keep having faith- even during the harsh times. G-d is out there and He will surely help.

The hero of this week’s parsha, Yosef, is renowned for the rough circumstances that shaped his life. His mother died when he was extremely young, his brothers hated him and sold him into slavery. He was incarcerated for twelve years for a crime he didn’t commit and all the while his father believed him dead. But through it all, what led him on and what kept him alive was a simple, flawless faith in G-d. We all require a dose of faith in our lives, and like it was for Yosef and my father-in-law and my mother-in-law, usually the outcome is very satisfactory.