So I made my calls ... two stores had jars. I checked my stash of discount cards. I knew I was low. Well, turns out that yesterday I did use the last card. I therefore had to go to the farther store. I had to stop three times to get a new card stamped. (The last stamp was going to be at the store.) As I am driving along, making the stops, I thought about all the times I could have stopped, and didn't. Just yesterday I decided not to drive by one. I was kicking myself today, why didn't I do it yesterday? What about all those times that I ran in to see if there were jars, and I was too lazy to give in something. So many times.
Then it hit ... Something I learned in JLI (Jewish Learning Institute). Gehinom, the Jewish "idea" of what Hell is, consists mostly of deep, horrifying regret. The example given was at the end of Shindler's List, Oskar is upset. He is crying, "I could have done more! This watch! If I had sold this watch, I could have saved one more Jew. And this car! I could have saved three with the car." He is broken. People are comforting him, telling him how much he did do. But he still feels this regret. Why didn't I do more when I had the chance to? That deep regret is what our souls are going to feel when we finish with this world. We will see a movie of our lives, and we will see the moments we missed a chance to do a mitzvah. Here is a forgotten bracha, there is a missed chance to smile hello to a co-worker. Every single moment that we "missed" will be highlighted. The soul will realize that it is too late now to do those things, and it will feel such regret.
And that is what I realized today. Just like I "missed" so many chances to get my card stamped, and now it is "too late".
All day today, I kept thinking about that ... how many moments of our lives are passing us by and we don't realize that a moment to do a mitzva has slipped by? How many tiny things just blew by us, like sand falling through our hands?
As the Baal Shem Tov said, everything that happens to us for a reason. There is something for us to learn out from it. You are reading my blog. You are reading about missed chances. This is your chance to make a difference. Try to carry around with you the thought that you don't want to regret later what you could have done today.
No blog post would be complete without my mentioning the 4/14 numbers. Today, in English, is Yossi's (a'h) birthday. When he was sick, we didn't have cell phones. We had pagers. When we had an emergency or crises, instead of paging our number, we just paged 414. Then we all knew something was really wrong with Yossi. It's always been our code. It's a number that comes up time and time again. Anyway. Today is 4/14.
I can't find it, but I know that I got a packrat card from Facebook that was card number 414. It might have been the rabbi one from the Chanukah set. Anyway.
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