There’s a woman I’ve known for years whose father was a great mekubal.

This woman and I took to each other from day one though at the time my Hebrew was probably unintelligible.

I remember I bought the most beautiful sweater once but no matter what I did it just wasn’t me. So I gave it to her. She wore it for her son’s bar mitzvah.

Anyway I saw her yesterday at the fruit-and-vegetable store. And her eyes were bulging.

She said “Tell me is this normal? Have you read anything about ikvesa d’Mashicha that says the tests would be so hard?”

I didn’t say what I was thinking because I didn’t think it the appropriate time — standing in the cold outside the vegetable store — but whenever someone brings up the subject of the signs at the end of days I think about my husband. Or rather about my husband’s trips to the soldiers who used to stand guard a little past the border of Kiryat Sefer when it was first being built.

My husband would bring the soldiers pizzas in the middle of the night. And talk. There were always new rotations of boys and he’d play a little ikvesa d’Mashicha game with them.

He’d ask them “Does anyone have a one-shekel coin in their pocket?”

The soldiers would seriously search their pockets sometimes their backpacks. And without fail they’d come out empty-handed.

Then my husband would go into his favorite proofs that this was ikvesa d’Mashicha “One of the signs written in Gemara Sota is that in the end of days there won’t be a prutah in the pocket. Some say everyone will be so broke no one will have a penny but one way to see it is that the coin itself will no longer be in use. It won’t be in anyone’s pockets.”

The soldiers always loved this example.

Then he’d get serious and list the rest.

I knew this list only because my husband had done it so many times. I let her know a few I knew.

The prices of fruits will be high though there will be an abundance. I’m thinking how apropos it is we are standing outside a fruit store.

Now she grew up in a home where one apple was split among 10 children and their delight in that small piece was the same as someone else getting a banana split the size of the table.

I didn’t know if she was just making conversation or she really wanted to know because if your father is a great mekubal how could you not know?

But I said “For sure it says that time will speed up. And that the tests will be so hard that even the greatest gedolim said “$$separatequotes$$‘Let it come but let me not see it.’$$separatequotes$$”

I list a few more like lack of modesty on every corner. And not just plain chutzpah but an overflowing over-the-top amount of chutzpah.

She shares about jumping into the words and letters of tefillah like into a teivah. That prayer and emunah are the only ways to hold on. And not emunah once a day but minute by minute.

“Second by second” we say simultaneously.

One night Rosh HaShanah I believe it was I walked home from shul with a very good woman. You don’t always know what she’s getting at because sometimes she’ll just throw a sentence into the air like abstract art. We were trying to make a shidduch for one of her children who’s looking so hard and trying so hard and is so good.

Then another woman joined us for the walk and she brought in a little of her tzuris.

And after hearing her problems added on to our problems I said “Remember when a town had one or two or three major tzuris’s and the whole community pitched in to help? Today everyone’s so absorbed in their own tzuris that it’s a flood.”

And then the one that throws sentences threw one right in the middle of the street. She kind of went into deep thought grabbed at some air as if it were something tangible and said “It’s like when we have to kasher a pot. The water has to go over the top.”