My jaw dropped. A major American kashrus agency was reaching out to me with a developing local emergency

AS a congregational rabbi and a rebbi at our local yeshivah, my Fridays are usually busy enough. I have to prepare the Shabbos derashah for the Young Israel of Memphis, I have to give a Gemara shiur to my talmidim at the Cooper Yeshiva High School for Boys, and like everyone else, I have to get ready for Shabbos.

Included in that last item is dealing with the occasional sudden crisis, the kind that only seems to crop up on an Erev Shabbos. That’s why, on a recent Friday afternoon, I was rushing around to all our local supermarkets, trying to buy up their stocks of a certain brand of canned pork and beans.

Let me rewind a bit and explain how I got there.

I put a lot of thought into my weekly Shabbos derashah, and on that fateful Friday morning, for reasons I can’t fully explain, the ideas on the parshah going through my mind just weren’t working. After Shacharis, I left for the yeshivah, hoping that my open afternoon schedule would leave me time to find the right devar Torah.

I checked my phone one last time before entering the school — and my jaw dropped. A major American kashrus agency was reaching out to me with a developing local emergency.

Their hechsher had mistakenly been printed on a limited production run of a small company’s cans of pork and beans. The kashrus agency and the company realized that this small batch of pork and beans had just been distributed in the Memphis vicinity, and they were scrambling to correct the matter.