As we count our flames each night, do any of those numbers take on a life of their own?

There are always some numbers in our consciousness that stand out — maybe it’s the number of children you were blessed with, the number of days a loved-one spent in the hospital, the number of years you held out for a shidduch, the number of months of unemployment between jobs, or the number of driving tests you took. As we count our flames each night, do any of those numbers take on a life of their own?

1 Mezuzah

Mindel Kassorla

On Heaven’s Door

WE were married a few years and still had not been blessed with children. My Uncle Jeffrey a”h and Aunt Malkie came to visit their children in Eretz Yisrael around Purim time, and they invited us for a Shabbos seudah. Never one to mince words, Aunt Malkie got straight to the point.

“We’re going to Bnei Brak this week,” she said, “Come with us and get brachos from gedolim.”

My aunt and uncle were very well connected, having hosted many gabba’ei tzedakah for roshei yeshivah and gedolim in their home in Brooklyn, New York. The next day, we set out on our brachah-hopping trip, culminating in a meeting with Rav Chaim Kanievsky ztz”l and his daughter, Rebbetzin Leah Kolodetsky.

My uncle went into Rav Chaim, while my aunt and I sat with the Rebbetzin. She instructed me to accept a few small commitments in my avodas Hashem, to daven, and to check our mezuzos.

“You should be expecting before Pesach,” she concluded in Hebrew.

Uncle Jeffrey emerged from Rav Chaim echoing the same directive about the mezuzos, and then we left. In the car ride home, I mulled over the Rebbetzin’s words. Had they been a promise? A hopeful brachah? I wasn’t sure.

“Don’t take the words of a gadol lightly,” my aunt warned. “I think you should just replace all the mezuzos altogether.” (So her type.)

We took the advice to heart and even purchased a new mezuzah for a semi-doorpost in our home that had never had one before. (Interestingly, we’d lived in only one other apartment prior to this one, and it, too, had the same questionable doorpost, also without a mezuzah.)

Well, Pesach came and went with no change in our family status. I was disappointed, but also confused. Maybe I hadn’t followed the instructions properly, maybe I didn’t daven enough? Or maybe the Rebbetzin didn’t mean it as a promise? I also wondered to myself whether you could actually rely on such things... after all, they are gedolim, not neviim. And anyway, all of those supernatural mezuzah stories are cool, but does it really make all that much of a difference in reality?

Then just a few weeks after Pesach — the day after Lag B’omer, to be exact — we received the amazing news that I was expecting!

“I guess there’s more to this whole mezuzah thing after all,” I said to my husband. But it had definitely happened after Pesach. So what of the Rebbetzin’s assurance?

“Don’t be upset,” my husband said, “but when I bought the newest mezuzah before Pesach, I didn’t have money on me. I came back to pay right after Pesach. I guess that’s when the mezuzah officially became ‘ours.’ ”

No one knows or understands all the factors in Shamayim that contribute to a yeshuah; for us, this was obviously meant to happen just then. But I did learn a timeless lesson in emunas chachamim. They mean what they say, and it has a real koach. If we do not see the fruits of their brachos, it’s because there’s something our minds don’t understand and should never lessen the value of their brachah. Sometimes the brachah is ready and waiting — for just one mezuzah.

Mindel Kassorla is the co-author of Part and Soul: A Torah-Based Guide to IFS (Internal Family Systems). She lives with her family in Jerusalem.