Is this the beginning of a joke? No, it’s three people (among others) who shared these three beautiful stories at one of the first of our Cozy Shabbat dinners in summer 2016.

ISRAELI FAMILY: GRAPES IN YOSEMITE

We (said these Israelis) like to travel and are here now for a special trip around the Northeastern US and Orlando. Shabbat has always been important to us which is why we often schedule our trips from Sunday to Friday and for longer trips we try to find a Chabad or Jewish community where we can celebrate Shabbat. And that’s why we are here! A few years ago we were in Yosemite for Shabbat, and we had little supplies and no community. My wife was insistent that we do something for Shabbat, but we didn’t even have Kosher wine or grape-juice. But then she realized we had grapes, so she squeezed them into a cup and we made Kiddush! It was a Kiddush we will never forget!

US ARMY CHAPLAIN: THE GATEKEEPER FROM PERU

Rabbi Moshe Lans is a longtime US Army reservist and officer and serves as chaplain. During his service in Iraq he once landed in Baghdad’s Green Zone and was quickly approached by one of the gatekeepers to that secured area – with a raised weapon. He tells the story much more dramatically, but here’s the main point: as things turned out the gatekeeper was a Peruvian Jew, part of a multinational force there, who signed up for duty in Iraq to bring home money for his family. He was so thirsty and eager for Jewish community and companionship, and was delighted when Moshe Lans invited him to join the group for Shabbat services. It reinforced Moshe’s view that whenever G-d sends a Jew somewhere, he never goes alone, there’s always another Jew to be found even in the most remote and G-d forsaken places.

CHASSIDIC PSYCHOLOGIST: THE SANZER STORY

I’m a school psychologist in the Yeshivot of Brooklyn, and here at UAlbany for a conference. During a break between sessions, an older man from MA approached me, being that I am visibly Jewish and Chassidic and told me he wanted to share with me a story.

Many years earlier he was close friends with a  Jewish neighbor. It was a nice block and all the neighbors got along. One day a new neighbor moved in, but they were unpleasant and obnoxious. The neighbors got together to discuss ways to deal with it. The Jewish neighbor spoke up:

“Let me share with you a Jewish way to deal with something like this. There was once a great Chassidic Rebbe called the Sanzer Rov. He said that he used to think that he wanted to change the world. Then be realized it was too daunting, so he figured he would change his own country. That too, was too much, so he reconsidered and decided he would work on changing his own city. Even that turned out to be too much, so he focused on his own neighborhood and community, and then narrowed that down to his own circle of friends and family. But then he realized that even that was too much, so he decided that he would just change himself.

“The question is,” said the Jewish neighbor, “how could the Sanzer Rov make such a gross miscalculation? Such a huge contrast? If he would be mistaken between the city and the neighborhood or between the neighborhood and himself, that would make more sense. But how could he be so mistaken that he first thought he would change the world, and then worked down all the way to just changing himself?

“You must say,” explained the Jewish neighbor, “that the plan never changed. The goal remained the same: Let’s change the whole world. The only question is where to start from, and the answer he learned was to begin with oneself. And the same can be applied to our situation. If we want to change our neighbor, we have to start with change in ourselves.”

That’s the story that the Chassidic psychologist heard from an older man at the psychology conference at UAlbany. He was amazed and in awe. He heard this Sanzer Rov story told in his community and school for many years, he heard it back when he was a little kid. And to hear this wonderful interpretation he had to travel away from his Chassidic community in Boro Park to a conference at a University up in Albany and hear it from someone who heard it from a neighbor decades ago yet it remained with him!