About a year ago, my father decided he wanted to do the mitzvah of peter chamor

By Rivkah Small, as heard from Rikki Benedek, age 12

My family owns a therapy farm in Jackson, New Jersey. We don’t live on the farm; we live about a mile away in Lakewood, but we visit the farm a lot to see our dogs, horses, and rabbits. About a year ago, my father decided he wanted to do the mitzvah of peter chamor, a mitzvah to redeem a firstborn male donkey. Most people don’t get to do this mitzvah in their lifetime!

Peter chamor takes preparation: First, you have to get a female donkey who never had a baby before, because you can only do the mitzvah on a bechor. Then you have to wait till she has a baby — and you have to hope it’s a boy. Once it’s born, it officially belongs to a Kohein, so for the owner to get the baby donkey back, he has to give the Kohein a sheep in exchange for it. That exchange is called peter chamor.

For starters, we had trouble finding a farm that sells donkeys. Finally, my mother happened to be in a store, and she overheard a woman telling a worker there that she owns a farm — she used to keep horses but as she got older, horses became too hard to care for, so she switched over to donkeys. My mother introduced herself and took the woman’s number. She kept calling her to see if they had a young female for sale, and finally they did.

But we couldn’t just buy one, because it would be lonely if it was the only donkey on our farm, so my parents bought two. (My mother jokes that it reminded her of the way girls like to go to camp with a friend — the donkey would only come to our farm along with another girl donkey.)