Encounter in Dallas: Tale of a Tiny Torah

Encounter in Dallas:
Tale of a Tiny Torah

Have you ever encountered a person you knew in the most unlikely and unexpected place? Bumped into a classmate while hiking in the Himalayas? Stayed at the same hotel as a relative on another coast, without knowing about it until the hotel operator connected a call to the wrong Feshbach (which happened to my father)? Accidentally built a new house right next door to the home of a woman you left at the altar years before (as happened to someone Iknew where I used to live)?

For all the coincidental encounters of our lives , I often wonder about the near misses. lf we come face to face with friends in the funniest places , how many more times there must be when we are in the same place as those we know, but turn the wrong way , choose a different aisle, ask for a different section of a restaurant, and simply never know how close we came to making a connection we would have spoken about, perhaps, for the rest of our lives .

And then there are the times when we make lemonade out of lemons   When we find connections even when there is no reason to assume we could do so.

I was paying for coffee at a check out line at the Reform Movement's Union of American Hebrew Congregation's (UAHC) Biennial in Dallas last month. The woman in front of me looked familiar. This being a convention, and such things being socially acceptable in this context , I said so. (In the Jewish context , of course she looked familiar. After all, wasn't she at Sinai? And weren't you?) Nine times out of ten such conversations take place between people who had, actually , met before, often at a previous convention. Nine times in the previous day people had said the same thing to me  And then there is the tenth time. After some discussion, I was fairly sure I had not, in fact , ever met this woman.

But then she looked at my badge. "Oh!" she said.  "You're from Buffalo.  I grew up three blocks from that synagogue."  Given that I have just moved here, that didn't mean that much to me, but this unexpected development held out the hope that at least I could reduce my embarrassment about telling a total stranger that she looked familiar .

And then the connections started to work , one right after the other   Two  members of our congregation were standing with me at the time  It turns out that this woman's father is a patient of one of them, and lives on the same street as the other. The woman's parents are divorced. Her mother lives in Boca Raton - and I have been in her mother's home for dinner when I was an assistant rabbi there.

The four of us spent a few more minutes talking We walked towards the evening concert. On the way , we bumped into a former assistant rabbi at another congregation in Buffalo, who had been at this woman's grandfathers' funeral, and her former rabbi in the city in which she now lives . We sat at the concert together, and as Peter Yarrow announces he is about to sing a song about memory , this woman leans forward, and asks one of our congregation's delegates for a favor.

"When you get back to Buffalo," she said, "can you do something for me? Can you help me find something?  It belonged to my grandfather, who was a rabbi, and he gave it to me, but I lost track of it. It is somewhere in Buffalo, but I don't know

where Could you help me track it down? It is a tiny children's Torah, with a gold cover, with an imitation ruby in the center of the cover."

The three of us from my congregation paused, and looked at each other. We knew exactly where this Torah was. It was in our ark at Temple Beth Am. It had been in our religious school wing, and this past summer , when I said I wanted to put children's Torahs in the ark as I had done in other congregations, our rabbi-educator, who is also new to the congregation, said he thought we had a couple he had seen when he was unpacking

We told the woman we had just met that we were now using "her" Torah every week , that children's faces glowed in pride and delight as they part1c1pated in carrying the Torah around the congregation.  That we had asked the congregation to help us obtain more such Torahs , and that the response has been very fawrable.  That her Torah had come "out of the closet" and into a living ark.

I assume that we are talking about the same Torah  It will be easy enough, I think, to trace its origins. If it is the same Torah , if this woman we met by chance does own it , it is hers for the asking.

But with tears in her eyes on hearing what had happened to her Torah, she did not ask for it back immediately    For the image of something she cherished as a child being used, being shared, spreading joy to other children was a powerfully spiritual moment for her. And not only for her.

How rare it is for a metaphor to be made so real For all the accidental encounters in our lives, all the chance meetings , all the coincidences , all of them... can lead to Torah. If only we are patient enough to  nd, open enough to see... the connections that bind us together. All of us. Every one.

It is said that the bush burned from the beginning. That God did not light the burning bush for Moses alone. That is was , simply ,always there. It was waiting.  It was ready to be seen.. by any who are ready to see.

So it is for us. There are miracles all around us. If only we open our eyes .