"Come on! Time to get up, Bugi!”

“Leave me alone,” Bugi groaned. “It’s not even morning yet.”

“What do you mean, it’s not morning? It’s seven thirty! You can catch all the minyanim at Zichron Moishe if you get up right now.”

“What’s the hurry? They have minyanim there all morning.” Bugi pulled his shabby blanket closer, huddling beneath it determinedly. “Who says we have to collect so early?”

Lulu looked at him sharply. “What do you want? A few coins to get you through the day or some nice money you can put away for your new life?”

“Will you give me a break, Lulu? We can collect just as well at Minchah time, can’t we?”

“All right, then. Stay here. But a year from now when you’re still hunkered down here instead of living it up at the Mamilla Hotel, just remember that I tried to help you.”

Bugi sighed and sat up, rubbing his hands on the blanket in lieu of washing them. “So you want to get started now?”

“You got it.”

“Okay.”

“Maybe this will help you to feel a little more enthusiasm,” Lulu said. He turned to his bundles and pulled out the brochure from the hotel, then waved it at Bugi. “This is your goal, remember? Once you have money and a normal life, you can take vacations and sleep in whenever you want.”

“I can sleep in whenever I want to now!” Bugi protested. “Or at least, I could if you wouldn’t wake me up. So now that I think about it, what do I need a hotel for?”

“It’s not the hotel you want, it’s the whole lifestyle. The ability to live on your own terms. You weren’t born to live like this, Bugi, homeless and dressed in shmattehs.” The old man’s eyes flashed. “Somehow you drifted into our group, but this isn’t where you belong. You’re meant to be somewhere better than this. And you’ll get there, Bugi. You’ll get there.”

As Zichron Moishe’s regulars filed into the shtibel for the 7:45 minyan, Lulu and Bugi were already there, rattling their cups.

“Mister, I think you’ve got something of mine in your pocket,” Lulu began, with the flair of a seasoned schnorrer, addressing a man with particularly bulging pockets. The man spun around in confusion.

“What?”

“My money. It got into your pocket somehow. Don’t you feel like you’re carrying some extra weight there, something that isn’t meant for you?”

Some of the men found his approach clever and amusing and others were annoyed by it, but very few were indifferent, and most handed over at least a token sum. By ten o’clock they’d collected enough to go to a local merchant and exchange their earnings for bills. Only then did Bugi think to ask, “I wonder how Musa is doing. You think we should go check on him?”

(Excerpted from Mishpacha, Issue 762)