In 1984, my husband Avrohom and I were in Israel visiting my
widowed mother in Har Nof who lived next door to my son.
After a brief stay, Avrohom left Israel to return to our home
and his mattress factory in Baltimore, USA.
Coming back from the grocery store on my last evening, I
stopped to read a notice on a pole. The name `Ruchama Shain'
caught my eye. The author of All for the Boss was due
to give a lecture in Har Nof that very evening.
When I entered my mother's door, I dropped my bag of
groceries and quickly asked Mom's permission to leave her for
about an hour on my last night. Mother was, as always,
understanding and happy for me. "Go and listen, and when you
return, tell me everything you can remember," she said.
I got to the apartment where Rebbetzin Shain was scheduled to
speak fairly early and took a seat up front. All the
furniture had been removed and chairs filled the room. Very
soon, the women of Har Nof filled that room and when the
chairs were all occupied, they stood. The door to the
apartment was opened and more women stood in the hall and on
the stairs.
I am sure everyone loved hearing every word. She told her
audience how she and her husband had promised her father, Mr.
Herman, that they would make aliya by a certain date and they
kept that promise.
Then she spoke of some of the distressful things they
encountered. They had hired a painter to paint their
apartment. He had asked for advance payment to buy the paint
and she had given him the entire sum. He never finished the
job.
Well-meaning friends had told them to bring a supply of
bathroom tissue because this item was expensive and of poor
quality in Israel. So Rebbetzin Shain had shipped a few
cartons of this item in her lift.
She was outdoors watching her lift being unloaded when one of
the moving men dropped a carton of toilet paper. It broke,
the paper rolls fell all over the street and the children who
were watching the movers began grabbing them and running
home. Rebbetzin Shain laughs now when she tells this but it
was not funny at the time. "Give me back my toilet paper!"
she yelled in English.
Now comes the part that changed my life. Rebbetzin Shain then
told us that one morning she said to her husband, "Dear
Moshe, from now on, whenever something happens to distress
you, I shall say six little words to you, and when I'm upset,
please say the same words to me: `Boruch Hashem we are in
Yerusholayim!'" When I heard those words, goose bumps broke
out all over me! At that very moment, I decided to make aliya
— and Boruch Hashem, we are here.
We met Rebbetzin Shain at a simchah a year after we
made aliya. I told her how her words had made me decide to
live in our Land of Israel.
"Oh," she said, "then you belong in my book! The whole theme
of this book is that one's life may be changed by something
someone says or does!"
She did, indeed, write my name in her book, Reaching the
Stars.
