W hat’s the greatest gift you’ve ever received?

How about the most significant or meaningful?

As Shavuos nears and we prepare to celebrate the giving of our nation’s greatest gift of all time writers reflects on personal gifts that have changed their lives in a meaningful way.

Zeidy’s Flame

Rabbi Yitzchok Meir Gruen

Zeidy was a fighter.

I know little of his childhood in Krakow. He usually began his life story with the black day when the Nazis goose-stepped into town and his life was overturned. But I do know that in a world filled with tantalizing “isms,” in a city that had lost some of its best and brightest to foreign ideologies, Zeidy remained a heise Gerrer chassid, connected to his rebbe, heart and soul.

When the murderers swept through Poland, Zeidy stayed one step ahead of them. He was fearless, hiding tens of people, risking his life for others, because you did what was right. He joined the Russian partisans, saw miracles, survived.

He married Bubby, whose father he’d known in Krakow, and they immigrated to America. These new shores offered asylum, a safety blanket of sunshine, ice-cream trucks, endless opportunity — and the slippery slope of assimilation. But Zeidy didn’t budge. He never did don a shtreimel, but he transplanted the fire of Gur to his new home. He was instrumental in establishing a shul in his neighborhood; he sent his daughter to Bais Yaakov and his son to cheder. He found a job, gave tzedakah generously, quietly offered his help wherever it was needed.

When his heart began to fail, the doctors told him he needed a warmer climate with milder winters. It was Florida or Eretz Yisrael — hardly a question in Zeidy’s eyes. He moved to Eretz Yisrael when he was in his fifties. He could have retired, but Zeidy hated being idle. He found a new job, revamped the entire department he worked in, soldiered on. He was an integral part of the small shul two blocks from his house.

By the time I got to really know him, when I came to Eretz Yisrael as a bochur, Zeidy was old. Yet he was still a fighter. He’d insist on going to shul even when he felt terrible. We’d inch down the sidewalk, pausing frequently, sometimes resting on a bench along the way, but Zeidy davened with a minyan. He continued to quietly help others. Because you did what was right.

The years passed. And then, one Shabbos, he was gone. The levayah was late Motzaei Shabbos; he was buried in a cemetery not far from his home.

The next time I went to visit the small, two-bedroom apartment I’d been to so many times, it seemed hollow. Bubby was like a planet whose sun had vanished. We spoke about the grandchildren, and she fed me gefilte fish and cookies. And then she opened the breakfront and handed me Zeidy’s menorah. “For you,” she said simply.

I wish I could say it was a relic of his home back in Poland, that it was a menorah handed down through the generations. It wasn’t. The only things Zeidy managed to salvage from his home in Krakow were internal. This was a simple menorah he had purchased in Eretz Yisrael. Yet when I light it on Chanukah, I see the tiny flames flickering in the dark night, and think of a man who always kept the fire burning.

Gold Exchange

A. Asaraf

I twirled the gold ring between my fingertips, examining the unusual shape of the amethyst inset and the way it sparkled under the jewelry store’s bright lights.

We bought this at that winter sale in Gemini, I thought to myself. My shanah rishonah ring, probably the only time my husband and I entered a jewelry store together. It had been shortly after our wedding. We had come to trade in multiple gifts — Havdalah sets, matchbox holders, and cheap Kiddush cups — for one heavy Kiddush set that would forever grace our Shabbos table. With a good amount of change to spare, we had bought this gold ring.

Should I? Shouldn’t I? I sighed. It wasn’t much of a question. Placing the ring gently on the glass countertop, I tried to sound businesslike: “How much did you say…?”