TIRE TRACKS
Before blessing the people, the Kohain recites the blessing… who has commanded us with the Mitzvah of blessing his people with LOVE!
R’ Yisroel ShemTov, a Chassidic Jew from Crown Heights, can sometimes have a gruff voice or exterior but always a heart of gold (his kindness and dedication to others is legendary). At one point he owned a bungalow colony in the Catskills which he rented out for the summer. The place was becoming rundown and he was having a hard time finding customers. Friends (possibly R’ Shmuel Isaac Popack who later bought the place from him) advised him to fix up the landscaping because people from the city look forward to grass and shrubs when they go up to the countryside.
So the year of this story Reb Yisroel hired a landscaper to reseed the great lawn, and spruce it up with shrubs, plantings and flowers. Perhaps the wooden train was added then as well. It’s a large big center circle with all the bungalows around its circumference and looking out on it. It was a big landscaping job. Before the season, he drove out there to check on it, and saw the beautiful new lush great lawn, and then was horrified to see two fresh, thick, ugly tire tracks running all the way across the lawn from the parking lot, past the pool to the synagogue at the bottom of the circle! He was so upset, that he cursed the owner of that vehicle to have two flat tires!
Later that week he met R’ Sholom Bruchshtat in 770, the Rebbe’s Shul, the central Chabad synagogue in Crown Heights. R’ Sholom is a hard-working Chassidic delivery man who sells or rents chairs and tables and such (and also happens to be a talented Chassidic musical composer who composed many of the beautiful tunes for many of the Chabad songs for the Rebbe’s birthday Tehillim each year).
R’ Sholom told R’ Yisroel that something unusual happened after he had delivered new chairs to the main building on his bungalow colony property – he had not one, but two flat tires on the road home. First one on the 17 (to become the 86) and the second one near the George Washington Bridge! This is so highly unusual, to have two flat tires in one day. Is there something wrong with your parking lot he asked?
The bungalow owner told him that was no accident, I cursed you for what you did to my brand new and expensive lawn!
“If your curses are fulfilled, why don’t you give blessings?” asked the delivery man.
“Ah, when I curse people, I MEAN IT!!” he replied. (This is best appreciated in Reb Yisrael’s externally gruff voice).
I followed up on this story and spoke with the son of the delivery man, who told me the story was true. And that R’ Yisroel Shem Tov insisted on paying his father for both tires!
R’ Yisrael Shemtov is actually well-known for blessing people with his whole heart. He gathers friends to pray for others and also do things to help. And some of these blessings have borne amazing fruit. But the message of this Tire Tracks story is how potent it can be to really mean something with our whole heart, may it be for the good!