“I should get excited that his honor, Raphael the sheigetz from Dresden, has graciously agreed to open a Gemara?”

The rain drummed on the windowpane all evening,

like an insistent beggar knocking at a door. Rap. Rap. Rap. Tovi curled up into a tight, red-eyed lump under her blanket.

At 11:30, Gedalya arrived home from his Thursday night shiur.

“She still hasn’t come out?” he asked.

“No.”

Earlier, he’d asked Kibelevitch if he’d leaked any sensitive information to his sensitive daughter.

“I didn’t say a word to her about the fund,” the gabbai had assured him. “We’re committed to absolute secrecy. We understand people’s sensitivities. You asked us to leave you the number. She picked up the phone, and I dictated four digits to her, not a word more. Was that a mistake, you think? Maybe we need to do things differently in the future?”

“What you did was fine,” Gedalya told him. “It’s all min haShamayim.”

He was tired, and wasn’t looking for mistakes at this point. He’d spent half his day at work doing that, and that was enough for him.

Kibelevitch sat his computer and opened a database. “Ah — I see your brother in Belgium already put in what he promised. He’s quick. So you’ve got almost 5,000 shekels in the fund. Plus two small donations.”

“Two more? From where?” Don’t tell me Tovi donated to her own fund. Just the sort of thing she’d do — take 20 shekels out of her Chanukah gelt and ask a neighbor to donate it with their credit card.

“Sometimes people give a lump sum and ask to divide it up among all the active funds,” Kibelevitch explained. “We have an automatic command for that.”

An automatic command. Click on a green square, and your money gets divided equally among all the accounts. So simple. But at home, Gedalya knew, his daughter was crying into her pillow. Or maybe not. Maybe by now she’d calmed down, washed her face, and sat down to decorate her bas mitzvah notebook….

Kibelevitch’s desk was clear of clutter, and Gedalya could see he was serious about keeping information secret. All the recommendations from rabbanim, all the reports, all the case details were locked up in a file cabinet or in a password-protected computer file. Nothing on the desk but a pile of leaflets that had anyway gone public, scattered among the city’s mailboxes and on the wet sidewalks.

“How much is that toward the goal?” Gedalya asked.

“It’s too early to check the percentage,” Kibelevitch said, getting up. He patted Gedalya on the shoulder. “We’re not even at two percent yet. We’re just getting started.”

Just getting started… how? Was he supposed to go up to people and say, “Hello, my daughter needs a complicated operation in America”? And “No, we don’t want to do the surgery here in Israel, for all sorts of reasons that I don’t have the patience to explain. And no, we can’t take a loan, because no gemach gives even a tenth of what we need. And no, we can’t take out another mortgage on our apartment, because the bank knows our financial state too well for that.”

But this fund wasn’t going to fill itself up.

“If you want help, let me know,” said Kibelevitch, taking his hat from its hook. “Until then, it’s a private fund, as agreed. Getting the money in is your job. If you want, we could even change the name of the fund and delete the description, so the call center workers won’t be able to read it to anyone.”

The wet streets sparkled as Gedalya walked home. Streams of water rushed along the gutters, seeking a way out, a river that would carry them onward to the sea.