“It just breaks me when someone’s kind ” she says. “Not regular run-of-the-mill mannered kindness but when they go just a little over the top or a lot over the top. If someone’s mean to me I don’t cry but the minute they’re kind that gets me.” She repeats the same idea twice.

“The other day I had to make a call for a babysitter. Everything and everyone was a dead end. But not just a dead end a cold dead end.

“Then I dialed another number and a woman answered. I started in about how much I need a babysitter for 8 tonight and she says ‘No I’m sorry I don’t think I can babysit ’ but she also admits she’s not the person I’m looking for. I ask ‘Is this the Snyders?’ And she says ‘No.’ But then she goes on about how much she wishes she could help me and wishes me a lot of luck finding what I need. And the way she says it with such warmth after all the cold I break down crying. From such a little thing like that.”

A pause.

“Did I tell you about that man the one who takes all the ladies from the families he supports with food packages to all the graves of tzaddikim in Tiveria and the North?”

She hadn’t told me.

“Well talk about kindness. First of all I packed a lunch” she says and in her organized way names all the things she packed 

“You know how petrified I am that I’m going to get hungry. I always get hungry on trips. But I sure didn’t need to. When we got on the bus each woman was handed a bag full of incredible delights. Not only for us but even things to take home for our children afterward. Chewing gum chips candies. When we got to Tiveria he gave us enough time to daven then he set up lunch at the picnic tables near the kever of Rabi Meir Baal Haneis. There was so much lunch that the food boxes couldn’t even fit on the tables.”

She giggles. 

“After we ate the rav gets up to talk. He says ‘Maybe you didn’t know this’ and then he goes into how the tefillah of a poor person comes before Hashem even before Moshe Rabbeinu’s. He wasn’t afraid to talk about what’s very painful. He wasn’t afraid to express this point of extreme pain with such love and caring. It was the most unbelievable kindness.”

After lunch we went straight to Meron where we also had enough time to daven. Then we got back on the bus thinking we were going home but the bus headed to Acco. And there dinner in a fancy restaurant was waiting for us.

“You know the last time I ate in a restaurant?” she asks. “Meat and more meat. And he kept saying ‘Ask for more of whatever you want.’

“He couldn’t give enough. You could feel it.” She pauses to feel it.

“On the way home the woman sitting next to me says ‘When a person gives with all their heart you can see it. When it’s not with all the heart you can see it. There’s no chachmah there’s no intelligence involved.”

My friend pauses again.

“There’s no wisdom needed to understand” she stresses to me. “This really means something to me. Because today everything’s about intelligence. We learn to trust our intelligence instead of our hearts and we get completely deceived or confused trying to justify our heads when our hearts see something else. There’s no intelligence needed. Kindness actually breaks the walls my intelligence put up.”

Pause.

“That’s why it just breaks me.”