By P Zarchi
Rabbi Danny Yaffe is a shliach and rabbi of a Young Adult Chabad Club at a shul in Sydney, Australia. A young man who lives overseas, who was hospitalized in Australia and was in an isolation ward, called him. His doctors thought he had only a short time left to live
“I am sharing the following story with full permission of the protagonist, while not revealing his real name,” says R’ Yaffe. “The story is relevant to each one of us and teaches us the enormous power we have to bring about change in our lives and the lives of others.”
UNEXPECTED PROBLEMS
“Before Purim, I met a young man, 25 years of age, who had come to Sydney from overseas. Being new in town, he wanted to meet young Jews his age and widen his circle of friends. I took him under my wing.
“At a certain point though, I could no longer reach him. I tried to call and invite him to Shabbos and yom tov meals, but he did not return my calls and did not respond to my texts.
“After a break of several weeks, I tried inviting him again. This time he called back and explained why he hadn’t been in touch recently. He had been sent by his employer to be immunized. A few hours later, his body reacted badly, he went into shock, and his systems started shutting down. Now he was in isolation and of course he could not join us for a Shabbos meal. When I said I wanted to visit him, he told me he could not have visitors because of his weak immune system.
“We spoke on the phone for a while and then I wished him a refua shleima and promised to daven for him. A week later, two days before Pesach, I called him again. I wanted to hear how he was doing. He told me he had undergone an operation and now everything was fine and he was going to be released Erev Pesach.
“The first night of Pesach we had the honor and privilege of hosting him and his family who had come from overseas to be at his side during the surgery and recovery. We thanked Hashem for his recovery and good health.”
THE SKY IS FALLING
“Three weeks ago, on Thursday night, I got a text from him in which he asked me to get back to him as soon as possible. This time, the news was bleak.
“His body had begun to break down again and the doctors were concerned about two serious possibilities. After running some tests they were 60% sure that it was leukemia, but if the diagnosis was wrong, then it seemed it was an auto-immune disease.
“His medical condition had a severe effect on his emotional well-being. It was hard for him to handle and he did not know what to do. He was not a local, his parents had already left the country, and I was one of his only acquaintances in town. We spoke a bit and I went to round up people to provide him with support.
“That day, I went to the hospital to visit him and we spoke for hours. I tried to put his situation in the right perspective, to the best of our abilities.
“At the end of our conversation he asked me, ‘Rabbi, how can I prepare myself for the worst?’
“‘As Jews,’ I said, ‘we prepare ourselves for the best, not for the worst.’
“I gave him an idea how to improve his situation based on the wording of the Yomim Nora’im prayers, where it enumerates the three things that cancel an evil decree – t’shuva, t’filla and tz’daka. We spoke about what these three mitzvos mean according to Chassidus and that same night he made positive commitments. He committed to davening slower when he put on t’fillin and to buying new t’fillin. And he committed to giving five coins to tz’daka every day.
“It was easier to make resolutions for t’filla and tz’daka but he couldn’t come up with a daily commitment for t’shuva. He wanted something that would be easy to remember and do, something personal, that nobody else would know about.
“I suddenly remembered a miracle story that I heard about the Rebbe. It was when an American young man was going to be drafted into the US army and his father was worried about his safety. He asked the Rebbe for a bracha on his behalf. The Rebbe said that he should be careful about washing his hands before eating bread.
“One time, when the soldiers in his unit were on patrol, he remembered that he had not washed his hands and he ran back to do so. A few minutes later, a mighty explosion rent the air and he saw that all the soldiers in his unit had been killed in an ambush.
“After telling this story, he added washing his hands to his list of good resolutions.”
UNEXPECTED CHANGE
“A few days went by and it was Friday when I got a text from him. I called him and he said that just twenty minutes after doing his three resolutions, the doctor came to tell him that, completely unexpectedly, his liver had started working again. That was excellent news but he thought there might be a medical explanation for this astonishing change.
“After three days, the good and miraculous news began to pour in. After a series of tests, the doctors said they ruled out leukemia. They also said it was very unlikely that it was an auto-immune disease.
“On Thursday, the doctors said that all his symptoms had disappeared and on the following Monday he was told that all the tests were completed and the results showed that he was perfectly healthy.
“He was finally able to conclude his visit to Australia and return home to the US where he planned on doing another series of tests to make sure he was indeed healthy. He bought a new pair of t’fillin and called himself by a Jewish name, Yeshayahu Mordechai Tzvi for the yeshua that Hashem did for him, and his father’s name is Refoel, which is also fitting.
“It was an open miracle. We should not minimize the power of ‘simple’ mitzvos to bring about miracles.”