Hashem’s Tapestry

Hashem really outdid Himself in this particular life-altering salvation.

It happened 11 years ago. By day, I was working as office manager and bookkeeper for a Jerusalem-based financial services corporation. By night, I was raising four teenagers single-handedly following the passing two years previously of my young husband. Despite my busy life, I wrote an hour daily, keeping alive my dream to write a novel about two women who operated a graphic design studio in 1980’s Jerusalem. I had no clue what work in a graphic studio was like, but there you go: That was my dream.

On the day before my kids and I were due to fly overseas to attend a family reunion and, much to the shock of my boss and I, the head of Sales committed a betrayal of great personal and professional scope. What do we do with his clients? What do we do with our bank accounts? And what am to do about my novel writing? Insisting that I stick to our family’s vacation plans, my boss kept me in the loop about subsequent actions via trans-continental emails. Suffice it to say that he fired the Sales chief immediately, though my boss’s characteristic kindness and mercy convinced him to handle the matter in-house as opposed to contacting the police as both my father (an ex-juvenile court judge) and yours truly thought prudent.

They say the damages from an earthquake does not end with the quake itself but rather continue with strong and equally terrifying aftershocks. Upon my return to work, this scenario played out to my continuous dismay: the phone rang off the hook. I uncovered questionable deals of poor judgment yet large Sales commissions. Clients of the former Sales chief demanded action.  I soldiered through as best I could. However, the stress was taking its toll: I began to develop heart palpitations and ulcer-like stomach pains.

At the end of a particularly grueling week, I was in the Ma’ale Adumim shopping mall on errands. Exiting the escalator I ran into my old boss and mentor, Charley Levine, z”l.  Charley and I had worked together at the World Zionist Organization, the first major post-aliyah job for both of us.

“Channa!” he exclaimed. “I was thinking about you yesterday and I never think of you.”

Knowing Charley’s mannerisms, the back-handedness of his comment upset me not in the least though it raised up my antenna a notch. “Oh?” I said.

“Yeah. Are you looking for work?”

Truth be told, I loved my job. Ordinarily, I would have said “no” and carried on with my errands, but these were not ordinary times. Instinctively, I said, “Yes, I am.”

“Well…” he started and proceeded to tell me about an owner (female) of a graphic design studio (can you believe it?) in nearby Kfar Adumim who was looking for a bookkeeper. I do not remember much more because the words “graphic design studio” stunned me to the depths of my being. I mean here was Hashem, not only tying together the coincidences of a chance meeting with Charley with a way forward toward new employment, but even more amazingly here He was providing me with the answers to my novel-writing conundrum!

Meeting the woman was an employer-employee match made in Heaven. She and I shared much in common: born and raised in California; made Aliyah on our own; married Israeli men who both of us lost years later to cancer. Thankfully, my former boss completely understood my desire for a change, going so far as to throw me a surprise party after I finished training my replacement.

With hindsight gained from Rav Shalom Arush’s series of “Garden” books, I know, now, that my affirmative answer to Charley was not so much instinctual as it was pure unadulterated emunah.  I remember the prickly head-to-toe electrical current that went through my body for minutes afterward as I contemplated the novel-like “coincidences” that Hashem had to arrange in order to approach me at the right moment with just the right person. On top of that was the sudden realization that He acts this same way with the man across the way and the woman in front of me, and in fact with everyone!

“Mikreh”, the word for coincidence, is spelled Mem, Kuf, Raish, Hey. Most of us know that a reordering of the letters will yield Rak M’Hashem (only from Hashem). Orit Esther Riter tells the story of a Hasidic master who offered an alternate result, that of the word “rikmah” or tapestry.  On our side, the Master said, we see the threads of coincidence as one huge mishmash. One pops out five rows above us. Another stretches way across to the far side. We have no sense of a complete picture. On Hashem’s side, however, the view is entirely different. It is the view of a beautiful, complete work of art.

I end with a prayer that each of us be granted the opportunity to one day see the world from Hashem’s side of the tapestry.