I’m writing this with the experience still fresh in my mind of being an honoree at a yeshivah dinner just days ago. It’s an experience that everyone ought to undergo at least once in a lifetime — and fear not the odds aren’t bad that you will! Here then some musings of an honoree has-been thoughts from On High — the dais that is.
It so happened that the main guest of honor at this dinner truly earned his title doing a phenomenal job of bringing in sorely needed revenue for the yeshivah. A respected businessman with wide family and commercial connections the ads placed in his honor filled page after page in the dinner journal including lots of those colored ones at the front. The ads on my behalf? Let’s just say somewhat less so.
And so sitting next to this fellow on the dais was one of those opportunities one gets in life to actually feel ever so slightly what it’s like to give the accounting that awaits us all after a hundred and twenty. After all we honorees all worked for weeks on end toward a certain goal and now this evening it’s the Day of Reckoning so to speak with the fruit of your efforts plain for all to see in the Sefer HaZichronos. It’s like walking into one of those great stories-with-a-mashal you heard as a kid at Shabbos afternoon Pirchei except that instead of the protagonist being Yankel — who went overseas to collect diamonds and came back with potatoes it’s you.…
Of course I too put in considerable effort for a yeshivah that really deserves all the support I could possibly give it and my time and energy did bear fruit. I’m also heartened by an anecdote that Rav Berel Kanarek shared with me in which Rav Yisrael Salanter approached a poor man for a donation to the Kovno Kollel which the latter was unsurprisingly unable to honor. A bystander asked Rav Yisrael what he was thinking in approaching the man in the first place to which he replied: “Velen darf her velen.” This can be understood to mean that Rav Yisrael felt it important for the man to at least want to give and his request was intended to stir precisely that desire to do so within him.
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