The Main Beneficiaries

Living Emunah By Rabbi David Ashear

The good deeds we do for people eases their minds and helps them continue on with their lives happily. The Gemara in Baba Batra says, whoever is constantly doing acts of tzedaka will merit to have children who are wise in Torah and financially secure. When a person is asked to help others, there's a natural yetzer hara that tries to dissuade him by telling him what a burden it's going to be. Our Chazal have given us ammunition to fight this yetzer hara by telling us how much more we gain when we help others. Rabbi Tzvi Nakar told a story about a woman who was married for six years without children. Her neighbor passed away from a serious illness leaving four orphans. The children's father was not completely functional. And so, heroically, they accepted to take care of the four orphans as their own. Miraculously, soon thereafter, without any medical intervention, she and her husband merited to have their own children, and baruch Hashem, they had many, many children. They took care of the orphans as well as their own children, and eventually they married off all four orphans. One Shabbat, they went out of town and allowed others to use their apartment while they were away. One of the guests carelessly lit her Shabbat candles on a plastic surface in one of the bedrooms, and it caught fire and spread very quickly. Baruch Hashem, nobody was harmed, but the apartment got destroyed. The owners of the home had no hard feelings towards them. They were the ones calming their negligent guests down, saying it was all min haShamayim , and they accepted it with love. In the fire, another miracle took place. Everything was burned except for the room in which the orphans slept. That room did not even have the smell of fire. In addition, there was a closet in a different room that had two shoe drawers at the bottom, which held the orphans' slippers. The entire closet got burned except for those two drawers. It was as if the orphans created a protective wall around everything that was theirs. After the fire, this family had incredible siyata d’Shamaya . A contractor offered to rebuild their apartment at cost price. A man who sold building materials, said that he wanted to donate all the materials for free. During the rebuilding, they added on three new rooms. Today, they have a large, spacious apartment with all of their children living happily in it. The fire was actually the catalyst for their brand new, large apartment to come about. They did a tremendous chesed in raising four orphans, and Hashem gave them children as a result. They did a chesed of lending out their apartment, which initially seemed to cause a loss. But in the end, Hashem only enlarged their apartment from it. The main beneficiaries of any chesed are always the ones who are providing the chesed .