LESSON FROM A MINE

By D Chaim

Everything was moving along as usual on that sunny day. The gold mine was humming with dozens of miners. One operated the excavator machine, another miner slowly climbed up with a load. They all worked hard, sweating and putting in a lot of effort.

Nobody dreamed what would happen in a few minutes. “Jay, did you hear something?” It was Alex, one of the miners, who heard a muffled rumbling from the distance.

“No, I didn’t hear anything,” said his friend.

Alex was not reassured. He was afraid that there was a lack of security in the mine which could lead to his being buried alive. When a few minutes passed and the noise persisted, Alex went over to the foreman and tried to alert him to the impending danger.

The foreman listened to him and said, “Don’t worry. Those are noises that we’ve been hearing regularly lately. They must be coming from the new machines being used in the area.”

When Alex saw that the foreman wasn’t nervous, he calmed down too and went back to work. Some more time went by and then suddenly, the noise got louder and could be clearly heard by everyone throughout the deep mine. People shrieked and some of the miners hurriedly ran to the elevators. Some of them tried their luck running toward the emergency rooms.

A few seconds passed and the mine collapsed! The walls caved in and thick clouds of dust were everywhere. Rocks bounced all over and dozens of miners were buried deep in the earth.

Darkness. That is what the miners who were buried alive first saw. A heavy darkness that you could almost touch. They did not dare to move even a single step in fear that they would trip over something.

Alex did not have time to think what would have happened if he had left the mine before the tragedy took place. He was busy with attempts to extricate his foot from under a pile of rubble. “Are you alive?” he heard Jay ask him.

“Yes,” he whispered, as though nobody was allowed to hear him.

Little by little, thirty-three miners discovered that they were miraculously alive, but their situation was bleak. They were buried alive deep in the mine, more than 600 meters under the earth. At first, they still anticipated rescue workers coming, but they slowly came to the realization that the rescue workers were sure they had all died.

Weeks went by! The strong desire of the miners to remain alive enabled them to find solutions for survival. One of the miners found food that had been set aside in the mine in case of emergency and he carefully distributed a little bit at a time so the food would last and provide for all of them for as long as possible.

One miner set forth a schedule for them: when they would go to sleep, when they would get up, and so on. That is how they kept their sanity. Over time, their eyes adjusted to the darkness which enabled them to walk around. They all tried to remain hopeful that the day would come when they would be rescued from the depths of the earth. Only Alex lost hope. He barely even opened his eyes.

One day, the miners heard a weak and distant sound of drilling. “The rescue workers are coming!” exulted the miners. Every day the sound came closer until the miners saw the edge of the machine. They quickly wrote a note that they were alive and attached it to the drill bit. Hope filled their hearts. Now, when people knew they were still alive, surely they would make every effort to get them out.

Jay felt bad for his good friend Alex, who looked so downcast. Alex sat wrapped up in his corner, his eyes closed. He hardly ate. He had lost hope a while ago.

“Alex, you know what? They are trying to get us out! Very soon we will be out of here!”

Alex did not believe him. “You just want to cheer me up. There is no way we are ever getting out of here.”
“But Alex,” pleaded Jay, “Listen! Hear for yourself the sounds of drilling. Do yourself a favor and listen, pay attention and you won’t have to be convinced.”

But Alex, having been underground for so long, believed there was no way to get out. He did not open his eyes or listen with his ears. Even when the rescue workers reached him and carried him out, his eyes remained closed. He opened them only when he felt the rays of the sun caressing his face. Then he felt bad about all the time he had spent in sorrow. He could have opened his eyes and happily anticipated the rescue that finally came.

***

Shneur, the person in charge of Tzivos Hashem activities in the neighborhood, finished telling the true story of the Chilean miners that happened five years ago. The children were enthralled by the story.

“It really happened?” asked one of them.

“Yes,” said Shneur. “The whole world knew about it. It is also a mashal (parable) for our situation today.

“The Rebbe says the world is ready for Geula. We just need to open our eyes and contemplate the events happening in the world, learn the Rebbe’s sichos from 5751-5752, and realize how the world is truly ready for Geula.

“Just like Alex the miner, if he would have opened his eyes and paid attention to what was going on around him, he would have realized that he was about to leave the hole so soon, so too with us, and even more so. We need to look around us with Geula eyes and then we would see how immediately, in the next moment, we are going out of galus to the final Geula.”