Photo Credit: Jewish Press

Reb Meir is my business partner. Our partnership goes back some twenty odd years, back to the days when I was just starting out. His help is always appreciated and often comes about in the strangest of ways.

You see, there’s this large pushka on my desk with his name splashed on it in bold, black letters. Whenever an issue crops up – and it unfortunately happens more often than you can imagine – I push some bills through the hole and feel my tension dissipate. I know my salvation is not far from coming. Truth is, I stuff some cash inside my Reb Meir Baal Haness pushka even when things go well, like before signing on the dotted lines of a fantastic business deal.

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Reb Meir Baal Haness never lets me down.

Isaac, my live business partner, knows about my relationship with Reb Meir. He looks on with interest, despite his reluctance to admit its potency. He’s watched little bumps smooth themselves out, but with our recent “biggie,” even Isaac had to concede.

We are in the real estate line. Though we embarked with high expectations, it hasn’t been all smooth sailing for us.

I thought we’d face something like: Buy. Find tenants. Get paid. Make money.

I learned to tone down my expectations. All too often, we’ve fallen in with poor buys, bad tenants (or no tenants), unpaid rent and financial losses. Over the years, there have been more complications than I could enumerate.

That gave me all the more reason to draw close to Reb Meir. When I was growing up, I saw how dear the Reb Meir Baal Haness charities in Eretz Yisrael were to my father. He often talked about the importance of giving and I knew my father sent them large donations frequently.

With my real estate bumps, I grew accustomed to sending money, too. There was the time we had too many vacancies and shortly after my donation, the apartments suddenly filled up. On a different occasion, just when our coffers at the bank were extremely low, there was a fire in one of our properties and we received a hefty sum from the insurance company. I won’t quickly forget Hans, the drunken addict whom I was scared to evict even though he hadn’t paid his rent for months. A few bills in the pushka and Hans gave us notice that he was leaving…

Call it happenstance. Isaac didn’t give my donations much credit, either. But I knew it was Reb Meir, and I began calling him my “partner.”

But with our latest miracle, I didn’t have to say anything. Isaac was the one who told me – “Hey, it has to be Reb Meir!”

It all began a couple of months ago, when we purchased a property not far from a local college. Some renovations were necessary in order to convert the building into a student campus. That meant dividing some apartments into smaller, studio-style units. The first thing we did was the legal filing. Then we called our contractor and settled the job. After a few weeks of work, he was happy to show us the completed project. Finally, we could put the units up for rent.

To our dismay, the post-construction inspection didn’t go over well. We were told that there was a problem with the bathrooms we had added. I was flummoxed. After all, our plans had gone through legal approval before we began the construction! Every inch of those bathrooms had been authorized. What had changed?!

Isaac and I sat down to calculate our losses. The cost of the original renovations. The cost of taking it all apart. The cost of the lost rent. It tallied to a huge sum. Sure enough, the good friend on my desk got a nice sum of money from me that day. “You’ll see,” I said, “Reb Meir will get us out of this mess!”

Isaac shrugged. “It’s over and done with. What’s the point?”

But I wasn’t that quick to give up. I spoke to our lawyer regarding setting up a second inspection. Perhaps we’d find a kinder inspector, or at the very least, one who was willing to explain what had gone wrong.

“Let’s give it until Thursday,” I told Isaac, convincing him not to throw in the towel yet. “By then our ‘partner’ will certainly straighten things out.”

To be honest, I was a bit apprehensive. Things didn’t look likely to change and there was a lot of money at stake. I davened extra hard and continued pumping the pushka with cash.

I’m sure you can guess the ending without my elaborating… Our renovations were confirmed to be legit and the building filled up in no time. And this time, both Isaac and I believe it was the tzedakah, Reb Meir, and a hefty dose of siyatta d’Shmaya that pulled us through.

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