Last week my friend Sam called with great news. “Rabbi,” he said, “I had a very important business meeting with a client yesterday, so I scheduled a lunch meeting. Instead of meeting at a non-kosher restaurant, I decided to go to a kosher one. I assumed my Italian client wouldn’t mind.
“We met at the restaurant. The food was great; the meeting productive. I was pleased the food was good, because people often complain about the kosher food.
“‘Why did you choose this restaurant?’ my client asked.
“‘This restaurant is kosher and I’m Jewish. That’s what Jews do,’ I explained.
“‘I’m one eighth Jewish,’ explained my client.”
One eighth Jewish? My friend Sam has been hanging out at Chabad long enough to know he needed to find out which eighth. So he asked her, and it turned out that her maternal great-grandmother was Jewish, making her 100% Jewish too.
This is a woman in her mid-50s, living in New York City, home to hundreds of thousands of Jews, and never before had she known that she, too, is Jewish.
Our sages tell us that one mitzvah leads to another. When a person chooses to do even just one mitzvah, G-d helps that person do another one and then another.
Sam chose a kosher restaurant for his meeting. By doing the mitzvah of keeping kosher, G-d led him to another mitzvah: helping another Jew discover that she is Jewish.
And guess which mitzvah our Italian friend is going to do this Friday night? She’ll be lighting the Shabbat candles for the first time in her life!
What is your Mitzvah for today?