Don’t Count Your Chickens

Photos: Esky Cook

With pallets of thousands of Cornish hens to give away, a Baltimore caterer with huge ovens and an even bigger heart is making sure thousands of families have a Sunday supper that’s not Shabbos leftovers

What do Rock Cornish hens and golden doves have in common? For Fishel Gross of O’Fishel Kosher Caterers in Baltimore, Maryland, one bird inspired the other. Galvanized by an important life lesson he learned during Eli Stefansky’s popular “8 Minute Daf” shiur on Berachos 53 (Fishel is a sometime-sponsor), the big-hearted caterer decided to pay his personal golden dove forward by giving homemakers and others a break from the hectic toll of COVID-19.

The story in the Gemara is about Rabbah bar Bar Chana, the fourth-century Babylonian scholar who was once traveling with a caravan. He ate at a rest stop, but only remembered that he had not recited Birkas Hamazon after the convoy had already pulled out. Rabbah wanted to return to the location of his meal to recite the prayer, as is proscribed in halachah, but he thought to himself: If I tell them to go back because I forgot the brachah, they’ll tell me, “Don’t you believe Hashem can hear you everywhere?” He thought it would be better to tell them that he left behind a very valuable golden dove. He wasn’t kidding — the mitzvah of a proper Bircas Hamazon was a true golden dove for him. And so, convincing the group of the necessity of going back, they returned to the rest stop — and sure enough, as a reward for his scrupulous attitude toward mitzvos, as he was about to rejoin the caravan, Rabbah bar Bar Chana found an actual golden dove lying on the ground.

The golden dove, Fishel understood, is the way Hashem makes good things happen when we go out of our comfort zone — our “golden dove” can become a real golden dove. That said, Fishel looked around and got to work.