What’s in the Rabbi’s Shopping Cart? 

Included in that last item is dealing with the occasional sudden crisis, the kind that only seems to crop up on an Erev Shabbos. That’s why, on a recent Friday afternoon, I was rushing around to all our local supermarkets, trying to buy up their stocks of a certain brand of canned pork and beans.

Let me rewind a bit and explain how I got there.

I put a lot of thought into my weekly Shabbos derashah, and on that fateful Friday morning, for reasons I can’t fully explain, the ideas on the parshah going through my mind just weren’t working. After Shacharis, I left for the yeshivah, hoping that my open afternoon schedule would leave me time to find the right devar Torah.

I checked my phone one last time before entering the school — and my jaw dropped. A major American kashrus agency was reaching out to me with a developing local emergency.