It all started by mistake when someone in my family handed our neighbors a Purim basket of all the leftovers crumbled cookies and half-opened orange somethings.
And these particular neighbors are a little sensitive and not because they believe they deserve more but because they live under the assumption they deserve less.
So when I got home and heard who got the leftover basket I immediately wanted to turn it around and started to prepare a new one.
Usually I’d keep the small can of coffee we’d inevitably get for Purim for when we turn over the house for Pesach throw out the old can and aren’t yet ready to open the big new one.
But in my great rush and desire to make the wronged righted I put in the coveted coffee can.
Coffee in our home is like electricity or gas in a car. First thing you see here every morning is people looking for coffee. So to give away a can of something so necessary was taking a great chance. But I thought it’s only five shekels I’ll just buy another one.
Well it didn’t work out that easily. For some odd reason that week there wasn’t a can of coffee in the stores and when my husband actually did find one it was a brand we don’t use and three times the price in a glass jar. And somehow after he put it down on the table when I went to unpack the other things in the bag it crashed to the floor.
So Erev Pesach almost a day and a half went by without coffee and I started seriously condemning myself for giving away that last tin accompanied by a loud chorus of “Mom you see? You can’t give everything away!”
And I started having doubts about it myself it’s true. I should have just given the small tea box and cookies some nosh and it would have been enough. And now was the proof.
Finally I decide to knock on the door across the street and ask if we could borrow a little coffee.
I had a little cup with me but the man instead asked “You want a whole can?”
He went into this giant storage pantry that had five or ten of everything a person would ever need and pulled out a whole full big beautiful shiny red-and-brown can of coffee.
Within an hour my husband also found four small cans of coffee tins hidden in the corner of a store somewhere.
Now with one big can and four little ones we were awash in coffee and I was trying to figure out the message. Was it right to give away the can or was it too much? Or both?
For some reason I remembered the gemara about two people stuck in the desert with only one canteen which contains only enough water for one to survive. And that the canteen owner is supposed to drink all the water so that he lives and not share it so that they both die.
If this is the case that would have made my coffee giving a grave mistake. But how can a person be sure there won’t be an oasis two feet ahead? The questions plague us: Did I give enough? Do I have enough? Did I get enough?
But something about my interpretation didn’t sit right with me so I asked my husband to look up the source and he found it and read the dissenting view: how if two are in the desert with just enough water for one to survive they should split the water equally. It goes on to say this experience itself is the peak and the key of our existence. That is to understand that we cannot decide what will be but to truly believe what is found in the Haggadah. It’s the central idea of Pesach of true freedom of breaking the bondage of our own selves of these questions that plague — Did I give enough? Do I have enough? Did I get enough?
To believe to trust to be grateful for every single thing every single second to sing Dayeinu. It’s enough.