Hashgacha Pratis Inspiration

Motek ↓

Mon, Jan 10 2005, 3:42 pm

Eliezer Mendelsohn worked for his father-in-law, Velvel Bernstein who was a wholesaler distributor of toys. This story takes place in 1973, when his business was an established and well-regarded firm, and was the only firm its size which was closed on Shabbos and YomTov.

One day, Velvel called in his son-in-law and told him that he wanted to show him how he ran his business. "I am about to make a wrong business decision, but a correct ethical decision."

He went on to explain that years before, a certain retail chain had given him his first big break by giving him a huge order. The chain continued to give him lots of business. As time went on though, more competitors forced the retail chain on to the verge of financial collapse.

Velvel was doing well, and wasn't dependent on this chain for its business, and so when the chain called him asking for credit so they could get back on their feet, he knew he was taking a chance with them.

He suspected that if he extended credit to them that he wouldn't see a penny of it again, but out of hakoras ha'tov (gratitude), for giving him the break he needed, he extended credit to them.

Sure enough, the chain went bankrupt and he lost $82,000, but he had no regrets, because he felt he did the right thing. A year later, another toy company formed out of the old company's bankruptcy and since they wanted to be on good terms with the vendors in the toy trade, they decided to pay back the old company's debts.

When Velvel was called, at first he said he had written off the bad debt, but when they insisted on paying up, he agreed to take stock in the new company. He didn't bother looking at it or doing anything with it, just stuck it away.

Four years later he looked at the stocks again, and decided to sell them. The stock was in Toys-R-Us, and were worth one million, seven hundred thousand dollars.

(names are real)

↑ Motek ↓

Tue, Jan 11 2005, 7:35 am

that too, but hashgacha pratis definitely! what's the question?!

I read the following:

The Twin Towers of the W.T.C. were places of employment for some 50,000 people, yet only (not to minimize the tragedy) 2800 people were killed.

At the Pentagon, where 23,000 people were the target, 123 people were killed!
In addition, the plane seems to have come in too low and too early to affect a large portion of the building.

On top of that, the section that was hit was the first of five sections to undero renovations, giving it a steel infrastructure that would help protect the Pentagon from terrorist attacks. It had recently completed straightening and blast proofing.

Because the renovations had only recently been completed and the employees had not yet moved back into their offices, the total Pentagon death toll (not including the 60 passengers on the plane) was approximately 120 people, a fraction of what it would have been had the jet hit any other section of the building.

Only 64 people were on Flight 77, which could have carried up to 289 people.
Only 92 people were on Flight 11, which could have carried up to 351 people.
Only 65 people were on Flight 175 which could have carried up to 351 people.
Only 45 people were on Flight 93 which could have carried up to 289 people, yet these few people stood up to the attackers and thwarted a far worse tragedy.

613 ↓

Wed, Jan 12 2005, 11:06 am

Another H.P. story:

The Rabbi's Advice Saved 2 Lives
by Rabbi Chaim Mentz

In the summer of 2004 Andrew and Sharon finally became engaged and asked me, their rabbi,
from Chabad of Bel Air, CA if I will officiate at their wedding ceremony on December 5,
2004? I was so happy for them, I answered OF COURSE, as long as you meet the 4 basic
requirements of a Jewish wedding, I would be honored.
1) They are both Jewish.
2) The bride will go to the mikvah prior to the wedding.
3) The food will be kosher at the wedding;
4) Neither are still married to another person. If so they must obtain a Get (Jewish
Divorce).

Both smiled, and were delighted, because nothing can stop them now. The
wedding was set as planned. UNTIL........

During a private conversation Sharon confided in me, that she was once
married to a Jewish guy, (who she refers to as "the mistake"), but it was
only for six hours, and the courts gave her an annulment immediately ....
due to the terrible actions of the "mistake."

I could feel knots forming in my stomach. How do I tell her the last thing
on earth she wants to hear. I began saying, "Please understand that what I
am going to tell you, may surprise you, but you still need a Get. Six hours
or Six years is still considered being married."

"BUT THE COURTS ANNULLED MY MARRIAGE!" "Rabbi .. please understand, IT WAS A MISTAKE."

Sharon who never ever wanted to revisit her past, let alone have contact
with "the mistake", couldn't believe what I said. I continued saying to
her "I want to do your wedding, please understand I can't do it until you
get a Get (Jewish Divorce)."

"Rabbi what if I can't find "the mistake"? "Am I doomed forever?"

"Please let's not fall into any false hopes. I will be there for you. Let's
contact the Jewish courts in Los Angeles, and they will help us go through
this dilemma."

I explained to both Sharon and Andrew, nothing happens without a reason. The fact you
need a GET today shows that something important happened in
Sharon's life, even if it lasted only for six hours.

Sharon would not allow her wedding to be stopped due to her "mistake". She
continues to plan her wedding, and honeymoon.

After spending a few weeks with the Jewish Courts in Los Angeles, Sharon
finally was free from "the mistake", until the Jewish courts told her, "Now
that you have your GET you can marry, but not before 92 days from today.
WHAT???? Sharon and Andrew immediately called me; "are they crazy? Is this
true? Will you not do our wedding on December 5th?"

I, calmly explained to them Jewish law, and tried to reason with them, why
there is a 92 day wait. All they could think about was, their wedding plans, their
honeymoon, their BASHERT! For days, they didn't understand why they
would have to wait for January 2005 to get married.

After a few days, both Andrew and Sharon called me and said we want to do
our wedding right in G-d's eyes; so they began re-planning their wedding for the end of
January.

But still in the back of their mind, they couldn't understand why G-d was
delaying their wedding. Well, not until December 26th. You see, Andrew and
Sharon were supposed to be on their last days of their three week honeymoon
in the famous Kaafu Atoll Maldives hotels: on Lankanfushi Island. Their
hotel room (see thumbnail photo) would have been swept up by the tsunami.

Both Sharon and Andrew celebrated 'their miracle' on January 1st, with a
special Kiddush in our shul. As Andrew said ... Best advice the Rabbi ever
gave us, was "Follow the rules of G-d's Torah, it will be a blessing in the
end for the both of you!"

On January 23rd, Andrew & Sharon plan on having their wedding. May G-d bless them with
years of happiness and health together.

↑ Motek ↓

Fri, Apr 15 2005, 9:32 am

from a Daily Dose of Kindness emails:

I was asked to read the Megillah (the Book of Esther) for a member of our community that unfortunately was laid up in a nursing home in Washington Heights for Purim.

After reading the Megillah for a group of people in a private minyan, prayer group I got into my van and drove from Englewood across the George Washington Bridge to Washington Heights to read for this lady.

When I finally got there, after spending half-an-hour looking for parking, she informed me that her grandson had read Megillah for her earlier.

Since I did not want her to feel bad about me making the trip in vain and, I realized that I could still do the mitzvah of Bikkur Cholim," visiting the sick, I spoke to her and prayed for her and then I left.

On the way downstairs to the lobby, I called my wife and told her what had transpired. She said to me, "Don't worry, you will find someone else to read the Megillah for there." I laughed and said that there was no chance of that happening.

As I got downstairs, I heard a rather loud altercation occurring at the front desk. Trying not to eavesdrop, I still could not help hearing the old lady in a wheelchair berating her daughter.

"THROUGHOUT MY WHOLE LIFE I NEVER MISSED HEARING MEGILLAH AT NIGHT….

"NOT EVEN IN NAZI GERMANY….

"THANKS TO YOU AND YOUR HUSBAND BRINGING ME BACK LATE, I HAVE MISSED IT THIS YEAR….

"THERE WILL NEVER BE ANOTHER CHANCE FOR ME TO HEAR IT AT NIGHT….

"I WILL NOT BE ALIVE NEXT PURIM!"

I went up to the woman and asked if she had heard the Megillah that night. When she answered "no," I asked her if she would like to hear Megillah. She said "Yes, but where could I find a Megillah and someone who can read it?"

I then showed her my Megillah and went into the synagogue at the back of the nursing home and read the Megillah to her and her daughter.

The good Lord moves in mysterious ways.

↑ Motek ↓

Sun, Apr 09 2006, 7:59 pm

Connecting the Dots

by Rishe Deitsch

South African emigration was at its peak and the Cohen family decided to leave as well, to make a fresh start in Israel. Mr. and Mrs. Cohen, and their only child, Batya, rented a townhouse in a heavily South African community in Israel, with its own community shul (synagogue).

Batya had just graduated high school so the timing for their move provided the opportunity for an exciting new beginning for her as well. Their joy was short lived when it was discovered that the headaches Batya was complaining about were due to a serious inoperable brain tumor. Within a short time she was gone, an only child, just 18 years old.

Shortly thereafter, Mrs. Cohen was diagnosed with leukemia. Still devastated from Batya's death, the situation seemed hopeless. Rabbi Levy, the rabbi serving the South African community in Israel, knew of my friend Esther and her work with energy healing, and he asked her if she would be willing to see Mrs. Cohen. Of course, she agreed.

Mrs. Cohen had been told that her only hope was a bone marrow transplant, but so far no match had been found. The best chance is a close blood relative, but Mrs. Cohen had none alive.

After working with her, Esther took her leave. She called Rabbi Levy and said that she felt that somehow, somewhere, there was a door remaining to be opened, but she didn't know what.

As soon as she hung up from Rabbi Levy, her cell phone rang. It was a friend who was in labor wanting to know if Esther could come be with her. Luckily, the birthing center was right near the hospital where Esther had just visited Mrs. Cohen.

Esther had attended many births in this center, and so she was very friendly with the people who worked there. As she walked toward the nurses' station, she suddenly stopped. She saw a young pregnant woman, who said her name was Sara, checking in. Esther was taken aback by Sara's strong resemblance to Mrs. Cohen.

It crossed Esther's mind that perhaps this young woman might be a suitable bone marrow match and that maybe it was worth exploring after she finished helping her friend give birth.

The birth went smoothly, thank G-d. Afterwards, Esther asked about Sara. She was told that the couple had recently moved to Israel from South Africa. Esther asked the nurse to find out if they would mind if she approached Sara after the birth, about being a possible bone marrow donor for someone. The nurse came back saying they would not mind at all.

A few hours later, Sara gave birth to a baby girl. Soon after, Esther introduced herself to Sara and her husband and explained the bone marrow donation procedure. The young woman agreed to have the blood test, although she had just given birth!

The blood test was administered. Now late at night, on Esther's way home at last after a long day, her cell phone rang again. This time it was the blood technician who was excited to report a perfect match! "A match like this is usually only an immediate blood relative," he said in wonderment. Elated, Esther immediately called Mr. Cohen with the great news. That very night, procedures were begun for the transplant to take place.

A little while later, Sara called Esther to invite her to her daughter's baby naming. It would take place on Thursday morning in the South African community shul.

During the conversation, Esther discovered that Sara had recently lost both her parents in a road accident in South Afirca, and this was one of the main reasons they had left. She was an only child and the memories in South Africa were too much for her. So they had moved to Israel. New country, new life, and now a new baby. Later that day, Esther met Mr. Cohen and told him about the baby naming.

Thursday morning both Esther and Mr. Cohen went to the baby naming. They were both taken aback when the baby's name was announced. Batya! As Mr. Cohen turned pale from the shock of hearing the baby's name, Sara stood up to explain to the assembled guests why they had named her that.

"I was adopted," said Sara. "I have always known it. I have always felt gratitude to my birth mother for giving me up for adoption instead of ending the pregnancy. My adoptive mother, who could not conceive a child, often told me that I was a gift from G-d. Now that I have my own child, I realize that all children are gifts from G-d. So we named our daughter Batya, "daughter of G-d." May G-d help us raise her to serve Him with all her heart."

The transplant was a complete success. Now the question begged to be answered. Who was this perfect match? Mrs. Cohen knew the answer. When she was a young girl of 16, before she was Torah observant, she had become pregnant. Over her parents' objections, she had wanted to have the baby and give it up for adoption to a Jewish couple.

At that time, an emissary of the Lubavitcher Rebbe had arrived in town. He was looking for students to come to his new seminary for girls with little Torah background. When he heard about the situation, he suggested that she study at the seminary while carrying her baby to term there. He also knew of a couple who desperately wanted to adopt a child.

Sara was this child, none other than Mrs. Cohen's own first child whom she had never seen before. Now this daughter had returned the gift of life to her own mother.

The family was now reunited and became very close. Sara recalls how she had worried that her baby would grow up without the love of grandparents. Mrs. Cohen recalls how she was sure that she would never experience the joy of holding a grandchild.

I call this story "Connecting the Dots" because it is a perfect example of how, though mostly we are unable to see the whole picture, sometimes G-d shows us that He is behind every detail. Nothing proves G-d's love for each of us like Divine Providence.

Reprinted with permission from the N'Shei Chabad Newsletter.

view it at this website:
http://www.lchaimweekly.org/lc.....6.htm

↑ Motek ↓

Sun, Jan 14 2007, 7:01 am

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/......html

Operation he invented saves doctor

Heart surgeon makes history again, this time as a patient

Monday, December 25, 2006

By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
THE NEW YORK TIMES

HOUSTON -- In late afternoon Dec. 31, Dr. Michael DeBakey, then 97, was alone at home in his study when a sharp pain ripped through his upper chest and between his shoulder blades, then moved into his neck. DeBakey, one of the most influential heart surgeons in history, assumed his heart would stop in a few seconds.

"It never occurred to me to call 911 or my physician," DeBakey said, adding: "As foolish as it may appear, you are, in a sense, a prisoner of the pain, which was intolerable. You're thinking, 'What could I do to relieve myself of it?' If it becomes intense enough, you're perfectly willing to accept cardiac arrest as a possible way of getting rid of the pain."

But when his heart kept beating, DeBakey suspected that he was not having a heart attack. As he sat alone, he decided that a ballooning had probably weakened the aorta, the main artery leading from the heart, and that the inner lining of the artery had torn, known as a dissecting aortic aneurysm.

No one in the world was more qualified to make that diagnosis than DeBakey because, as a younger man, he devised the operation to repair such torn aortas, a condition that had been fatal. The operation has been performed at least 10,000 times around the world and is among the most demanding for surgeons and patients.

Over the past 60 years, DeBakey has changed the way heart surgery is performed. He was one of the first to perform coronary bypass operations. He trained generations of surgeons at Baylor Medical School here and operated on thousands of patients. In 1996 he was summoned to Moscow by Boris Yeltsin, then the president of Russia, to aid in his quintuple heart-bypass operation.

Now DeBakey is making history in a different way -- as a patient. He was recently released from Methodist Hospital in Houston and is back at work. At 98, he is the oldest survivor of his own operation, proving that a healthy man of his age could endure it.

"He's probably right out there at the cutting edge of a whole generation of people in their 90s who are going to survive" after such medical ordeals, one of his doctors, Dr. James Pool, said.

But DeBakey's rescue almost never happened. "It is a miracle," DeBakey said at a Houston restaurant recently. "I really should not be here."

As DeBakey lay on the couch alone that night, last New Year's Eve, he reasoned that a heart attack was unlikely because periodic checkups had never indicated he was at risk. An aortic dissection was more likely because of the pain, even though there was no hint of that problem in a routine echocardiogram a few weeks earlier.

His wife, Katrin, and their daughter, Olga, had left for the beach; they arrived home to find DeBakey lying on the couch. Not wanting to alarm them, he lied and said he had a pulled muscle.

"I did not want Katrin to be aware of my self-diagnosis because, in a sense, I would be telling her that I am going to die soon," he said.

Katrin DeBakey called two of her husband's colleagues: Dr. Mohammed Attar, his longtime physician, and Dr. Matthias Loebe, who was covering for Dr. George Noon, DeBakey's surgical partner of 40 years. They came to the house quickly. After DeBakey gave a more frank account of his pain, they shared his suspicion of an aortic dissection.

Tests showed that DeBakey had a type 2 dissecting aortic aneurysm, according to a standard classification system he himself had devised years earlier. Rarely did anyone survive that without surgery. Still, DeBakey says that he refused admission to Methodist Hospital. He feared the operation that he had developed to treat this condition might, at his age, leave him mentally or physically crippled. "I'd rather die," he said.

Instead, he gambled on long odds that his damaged aorta would heal on its own. For more than three weeks, doctors made frequent house calls to make sure his blood pressure was low enough to prevent the aorta from rupturing. Around the clock, nurses monitored his food and drink. Periodically, he went to Methodist Hospital for imaging tests to measure the aneurysm's size.

But as time went on, the doctors could not adequately control DeBakey's blood pressure. He became short of breath. His kidneys failed. Fluid collected in the pericardial sac covering his heart, suggesting the aneurysm was leaking.

On Jan. 23, DeBakey yielded and was admitted to the hospital. Tests showed the aneurysm was enlarging dangerously; DeBakey was unresponsive and near death. A decision had to be made. "If we didn't operate on him that day, that was it. He was gone for sure," Noon said.

It was at that point that the Methodist Hospital anesthesiologists adamantly refused to accept DeBakey as a patient. They cited a standard form he had signed not to be resuscitated if his heart stopped and a note in the chart saying he did not want surgery for the aortic dissection and aneurysm.

To fulfill its legal responsibilities, Methodist Hospital summoned members of its ethics committee, who arrived in an hour. They met with DeBakey's doctors.

After the committee members had met for an hour, Katrin DeBakey could stand it no longer. She charged into the room.

"My husband's going to die before we even get a chance to do anything -- let's get to work," she said she told them.

The operation lasted seven hours.

For part of that time, DeBakey's body was cooled to protect his brain and other organs. His heart was stilled while a heart-lung bypass machine pumped oxygen-rich blood through his body. The surgeons replaced the damaged portion of DeBakey's aorta with a 6-to-8-inch- long graft made of Dacron. The graft was the type that DeBakey devised in the 1950s.

Afterward, DeBakey was taken to an intensive care unit.

Some doctors were waiting for DeBakey to die during the operation or soon thereafter, Noon said. "But he just got better."

As feared, however, his recovery was stormy.

For a month, DeBakey was in the intensive care unit, sometimes delirious, sometimes unresponsive, depending in part on his medications. The doctors were deeply concerned that he had suffered severe permanent brain damage.

But once his blood pressure was controlled with medicine, DeBakey began to recover well.

As DeBakey recovered and learned what had happened, he told his doctors he was happy they had operated on him. The doctors say they were relieved, because they had feared he had regretted their decision.

"If they hadn't done it, I'd be dead," he said.

DeBakey doesn't remember signing an order saying not to resuscitate him and now thinks the doctors did the right thing. Doctors, he said, should be able to make decisions in such cases, without committees.

Already, DeBakey is back working nearly a full day.

"I feel very good," he said recently. "I'm getting back into the swing of things."

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