There was a fellow who lived in Eretz Yisrael (Land of Israel). He built his little makolet (grocery store) with his own hands. As time went on, he expanded the makolet. Anyone who’s ever been to a proper old-school makolet in Israel knows: you go there 20 years later, and it’s as if time stood still. Everything is exactly the same. The guy spends his whole life stocking the thing, ordering the products, flipping the items, charging the people, sending the guy, and so on. This was this man’s experience. He spent his life building the makolet.
One day, this guy, plodding through life week after week, year after year, decade after decade, has kids who are growing up and already getting shiduchim (marriage matches). He’s walking down the block to his makolet when he notices a huge building going up down the block from him. They’re putting up this massive building, and he can see that it’s divided into a bunch of little stores. But the biggest part of the space is all open space. He thinks to himself: Either they’re building a basketball court here, or they’re building some sort of superstore.
So he goes to the construction workers on the site and says, “Tell me, I see all the other small spaces, but in this monstrosity of a project, there’s just this one giant open space. What’s it going to become? What’s it for?” And the guy says the most dreaded words a makolet owner, a mom-and-pop owner, could ever hope to hear: “Rami Levy or Osher Ad.” The guy knows: his life as a makolet owner is over.
My friends, what does the guy do? He finds the number for the owner of the chain and tells him, “Listen, I’m a grocery store in the neighborhood.” The guy tells him, “Look, I’m allowed to free market. I’m allowed to open wherever I want. I checked: legal 100%, kosher (fit under Jewish law), halakha (Jewish law). I’m allowed to do whatever I want to do.” He says, “I’m not coming to tell you not to open. I know I can’t stop you. But I have an entire store stocked with merchandise. I’m never going to be able to sell any of it. I’m never going to be able to open your doors. Please, what can you do?”
The guy says, “Listen, if you want, I’ll write you a check for every last object you have in your store and in the warehouse. Everything. And if you want, you can come work. You could be a cashier in my store.” Overnight, the guy’s a cashier. But overnight, what time does his job start? 9 a.m. When is his job over? 5 p.m. He goes to a 9-to-5. Suddenly, he could pray on time. Suddenly, he has time to study. Suddenly, he gets to know who his wife and children are again.
Maybe a week or two after he starts, he goes for a routine checkup. In the routine checkup, they find a growth—a silent killer—growing inside his body. Within days, they operate to take it out. He gets the treatments. His hair falls out. He’s very weak, and he suffers through the process of treatment and, Baruch Hashem (Blessed is Hashem), eventually gets healthy. When he finally comes home from the hospital, he throws a big seudat hoda’ah (thanksgiving meal) and asks all of his friends and family to come. His friends and family come together, and he says, “I want to thank Hashem, not only for saving me, but for the fact that God knew, before I even started my process, where He wanted me to land up.
“What would have happened to a store that needed to open at 5 a.m. when I now need to go through treatment for the next 12 months, 18 months? What would have happened if I didn’t have a lump-sum payment for every object? Someone came in and bought every stick of butter, every detergent, every tissue paper, including the one-ply tissue paper that falls apart on Shabbat. Hashem bought from me every product I have and gave me a job. I could check in and check out. He helped me get back to my prayers, start my sedarim (study sessions), and build my network of family around me once again, because He knew exactly where I was going.”
Every morning when we say, “God prepares the steps of man,” we don’t only mean that God takes you to your next raise. We also mean that God puts you in a furnace of fire. We also mean that God makes you move. We also mean that God makes you, after moving to a new place, experience a famine in that place. But make no mistake: the purpose of every one of those challenges is to build your name, to build your output, to build what you’re capable of producing.