We were driving home on the highway coming back from Tel Aviv
in a neighbor's van. I was sitting next to the driver and my
son next to me in the front seat. There was a problem with
the air conditioning so the windows were open and the stuff
on the dashboard kept flying forward. There was some kind of
sticker tape machine, a kippah, some parsha
sheets and a map of Israel. My son kept putting it back as it
slid forward. As the wind whipped through the automobile it
took with it a parsha sheet and it flew out the
window. My son tried to grab it but couldn't. His hand flew
to his mouth. "It was kodesh," he said.
Then another thought occurred to him. What if it flies on
someone's windshield and obscures his view and he has an
accident and it would be his fault. He gets this from me. I'm
always worried that four dominoes down the line I'm going to
be responsible for some terrible thing happening.
It's unlikely that would happen, I assured him, and it's not
like a whole newspaper that could really obscure someone's
vision. Besides, you weren't the one who put the
parsha sheet on the dashboard in the first place. And
it's not your fault that the car was malfunctioning and we
had to have the windows open in the second place so that the
sheet blew out and someone would have to be in the direct
path of the paper as it left the car.
"Don't worry," I told him. He still looked worried.
Our neighbor let us off. "Okay, let's visualize another
scenario," I improvised as we walked home. "The parsha
sheet blew out of our neighbor's car and into the open window
of another car. The driver was just then asking Hashem to
give him a sign that He truly exists. Now I happened to
notice that the headline of the story on the front page was:
"Every Jew must See Himself as if He Had Left Egypt." So now
this headline will fly into the car window of the questioning
Jew just as he asked Heaven for a sign. The driver will be so
amazed that he'll do teshuvoh and when my son gets to
heaven at 120, he'll see he has received credit from the
thousands of mitzvos that this Jew did because my son was
unable to save the parsha sheet at that moment from
the wind.
"Thanks," my son said. "That was a nice fantasy."
But it isn't a fantasy. Either one of the above scenarios is
a distinct, though unlikely, possibility. Either or neither
can happen. It's all up to Hashem,when all is said and done.
We can put in our effort and do our best but the final result
just isn't up to us. All the things leading up to and away
from everything we do is part of the master plan over which
we have no control. We can just do our best and pray for the
best as we try our best to fulfill our divine mission on
earth.
We cannot control which way the wind blows — only the
direction we take. G-d-willing, our actions will have only
positive results and hopefully, that imagined Jew on the
highway really will do teshuvoh.
