The Lesson Without the Book

The bookstore was closed.

I had walked several miles to Main Street to buy a book.

Not just any book. Over the years, I had built a large collection of Rabbi Avigdor Miller’s writings, and a new volume had appeared on the subject of money, prepared by one of his close students, Rabbi Yaakov Astor.

It was the third day of Sukkot.

I had imagined finding the book on the shelf, turning it over in my hands, perhaps reading a few pages before carrying it home.

Instead, I stood before a locked door.

So I kept walking.

Under the Schach

I continued down Main Street, bought a bottle of water, and crossed toward a shul with an enormous sukkah. There was almost nobody inside. I found a chair and sat down.

Outside was Main Street—cars, errands, stores, people moving toward whatever came next. Inside was schach, tables, chairs, and that strange Sukkot light that seems to enter differently when the roof above you is made of branches.

A gentle rain was falling. Not enough to drive me out. Just enough to be heard. Drops slipped through the schach.

On one wall was a poster. I do not remember its colors. I remember the sentence: A sure way to receive Hashem’s blessing is to focus on being a blessing in the lives of others. I read it again. Be a blessing.

Something about those words entered me. I felt a wave of gratitude and calm, almost a physical excitement. Stop asking only what Hashem will send into your life. Begin asking what He has already placed in your hands that can become a blessing in someone else’s.

I called my wife. She happened to be nearby. “Come sit with me.” A little later, she entered the sukkah.

For a while, there was nothing to accomplish. No program. No speech. Just my wife and me beneath the schach, listening to the slow rain. Neither of us needed anything from the other. We were simply there.

It was beautiful precisely because nothing was happening. Or at least I thought nothing was happening.

Then a stranger walked in.

Three Questions

He was a chassid. He pulled a chair a few feet from us.

“May I sit next to you?”

“Of course.”

Within minutes, somehow, we were no longer strangers.

He had questions.

“What does it really mean to start again?”

“What is the happiness of the sukkah?”

“How does a person know that he is truly serving Hashem?”

We began talking. One answer opened another question.

But beneath all three was really one:

How do we know it is real?

How do we know we are not simply telling ourselves a beautiful story?

Then suddenly he stopped and looked toward my wife.

“I’m very sorry.”

He had become so absorbed in our conversation that he realized he had barely acknowledged her.

“How are you two related?”

My wife answered. “We’re husband and wife.”

He looked surprised. “I could never tell.”

I laughed.

Then he asked her, “Do you agree with what your husband has been saying?”

“Yes.”

“With what?”

She smiled.

“Everything.”

There are endorsements a man waits his entire life to receive. I decided not to ask any follow-up questions. A little later, my wife left to take care of some errands.

I remained with the stranger.

What He Had Lost

We continued talking. At some point, he suggested that we dance.

So we stood—two men who had not known each other an hour earlier, turning in a small circle beneath the schach while Main Street continued outside.

Then we sat again. He still had his question.

“How do we know it’s real?”

I told him that perhaps we cannot always measure the purity of our own thoughts. But if a thought brings me closer to Hashem, makes me grateful, allows me to say thank You, and brings genuine joy into the life He has given me, perhaps gratitude itself is part of the answer.

He became quiet. Then the conversation changed.

“Can I tell you something very important?”

“Sure.”

“Value the good that you have in your life.”

Then he looked toward the place where my wife had been sitting.

“Value your wife.”

The words landed differently from everything we had discussed before. He told me that he was divorced.

He wanted to marry again. He asked whether I knew someone who might be appropriate for him—someone who could appreciate the Torah he learned and the home he hoped to build.

“Will you help me find someone?”

“Amen,” I said.

“So you will?”

I smiled.

“Amen is as much as I can honestly promise you.”

He laughed.

Then, trying to describe what he had just observed in my wife, his language became almost painfully direct: intelligence, beauty, spiritual depth.

He was not really evaluating women. He was trying to describe loss. Suddenly I understood why his words carried so much force. This was not a married man reminding another married man to appreciate his wife because that is what married men are supposed to say.

This was someone standing on the other side of marriage. Someone who knew what a home feels like after it is gone. There are things we understand while possessing them. And there are things whose size becomes visible only through their absence. “Please appreciate what you have,” he said.

Under an Open Sky

A little later, we embraced and I left. An Uber carried me back toward Forest Hills. The car had a glass roof. I leaned back and looked at the open sky. I thought about the closed bookstore, the sukkah, the stranger, and my wife.

A sukkah is deliberately fragile. Its roof lets you see what is above it. For one week, we leave a solid house for a temporary dwelling and learn not to confuse permanence with walls. And there, inside that temporary dwelling, a divorced man taught me about a permanent home.

Not architecture. Marriage. The person beside you. The one whose presence can become so familiar that you stop seeing the enormity of what you have been given. That is one quiet danger of blessing: what once felt miraculous becomes ordinary. The person we once prayed for becomes familiar.

Until someone who no longer has what we have looks at us and, without quite saying it, asks: Do you understand what is sitting next to you?

Then I remembered the poster. A sure way to receive Hashem’s blessing is to focus on being a blessing in the lives of others. I had thought the sentence was asking me to become someone else’s blessing. Maybe it was.

But that afternoon, Hashem reversed it. A stranger entered the sukkah looking for answers. Instead, he became one. I had gone to Main Street to buy a book about money. I never bought it.

But somewhere beneath the schach, I was given a lesson about wealth. It had been sitting beside me the entire time.

My wife. My marriage. My home. The bookstore was closed. I went home richer.