The mother wanted her son to go to Bar Mitzvah lessons, but he wasn't very enthusiastic about the idea, to say the least... How do we get him on board? The answer was my remote, car key.
It started like a fairly common story. A mother wants her child to take Bar Mitzvah lessons and make this event special in his life and the life of his family. However, the son gets nervous by the expectations, and is afraid by the thought of needing to learn a new language and being introduced to concepts that weren't part of his life up to this point. He refuses to cooperate.
As a last resort, I went for a home visit to try to break the ice through casual conversation... At the scheduled time, I arrived at the family home, parked my car, and started to walk to the door; but then the garage door opened. I turned around. I thought that they wanted me to come through there, but it didn't seem like anyone was greeting me there, so I turned back to the main door.
I spent at least 2 hours at the house. I had great conversations with the family and the boy; we connected pretty well, and I felt that it was a good beginning to assist the boy in reclaiming his heritage.
As I stood with the family by the doorway to the house, I got ready to leave and clicked remote to open the car doors - the garage door opened instantly. I clicked the key again, and the garage door stopped. Turns out... my car key opens and closes their garage door.
Standing there and watching it happen - the boy seemed to think that I have magic powers; the mother took it as a clear sign from heaven that this is the right path for her son... Without any doubt this incident closed the deal! When I got home and did my google research, I learned that indeed there is an extremely small chance that a random car key will match the code of a modern garage door.
My thought was that the fact that my key happen to open that garage is perhaps a touch of magic; but the fact that it was able to open the heart of another - this is
G-dly.
dreidel hunt, I forgot to do something, so I rushed back to the little town of Ganges to get something from a store. As I left the store, what did I hear but the blessing of the candles on the loud speaker by- you guessed it, a Chabad rabbi from Victoria who came to our Island to help bring Chanukah to us. And of course, he had dreidels to give away. Now we are eating latkes and playing with the dreidel that he gave me.