Photo Credit: Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis
Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis

“While you were helping my wife with the stroller, your pocketbook fell off your shoulder into the carriage. When my wife came home and found the bag she became sick over it. She was envisioning your worries. We could only imagine your distress. The thought of your doing an act of chesed and losing your bag as a result was very painful to us. We have been desperately looking for you. Baruch Hashem, I found you. I must call my wife immediately.”

As he was speaking to my son and daughter-in-law he dialed his wife to tell told her the good news.

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Can you imagine this happening in New York? Or in any other city in the world? Would anyone walk the streets searching for the owner of a lost pocketbook? At best a person who finds a lost item might take it to the police station. But in Yerushalayim this man and his rebbetzin could not have peace until they found the owner of the bag and returned it.

Among our many commandments we have the mitzvah of returning a lost item to its rightful owner. And while through the long centuries of exile many of our mitzvot have been forgotten, they are not lost but are deeply embedded in the crevices of our hearts and can resurface in a blink of an eye. That’s the secret of Am Yisrael, a nation that never dies.

We are one mishpachah. We feel each other’s worries and we try to alleviate the concerns of our brothers. Please don’t think I have some starry-eyed view of the people who reside in our holy city. I know only too well that there are problems everywhere, even in Yerushalayim. Society everywhere is corrupt, selfish, immoral and plain mean. But – and this is a big but – in the midst of all this dense darkness there is the Pintele Yid, the Spark of Hashem deep in our souls.

If that rabbi was so determined to return a lost bag to its rightful owner, how much more must we commit ourselves to returning lost Jews who are wandering in the dessert of assimilation to their home of Torah and faith in Hashem.

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