Finally, I gave up. The siddur was lost.
I loved that siddur with the special inscription.
Two months later, on a trip to my newly married eldest daughter’s home in Teaneck, New Jersey, I asked her for a siddur for Shacharis since I no longer had my own traveling siddur. She gave me one that felt very comfortable in my hand.
“This feels familiar,” I said. I looked for an inscription to see where it came from, to whom it belonged.
What a surprise – it was mine. It was a siddur given to me eighteen years ago by my father, Rabbi Philip Harris Singer, zt”l, upon the birth of my youngest daughter – the daughter who is now in Michlelet Mivaseret Yerushalayim.
I had forgotten all about it. It was inscribed by my father with a poem in Hebrew he had composed for the occasion.
My father died this past year, so I was thrilled to rediscover this siddur.
I prayed.
As I turned the pages, I noticed that some of the prayers had penciled annotations in the margins. For example, the paragraphs of the Shema were given names: Chesed, Din, Tiferet.
The phrase in Chapter 30 of Tehillim, “m’yordi bor,” which introduces Pesukai D’zimrah, was denoted as referring to Yosef, and the “histarta panecha” to Purim. Someone had cleverly penciled in the word “Mayhem” in the “Asher Yatzar” as a play on the words “im yipatach ached mahem.”
The handwriting was unmistakably Ariel’s!
I began to cry. Ariel’s comments were interspersed throughout the siddur. I don’t know if he used the siddur in a class, or just made his own insertions.
The siddur I had lost in Israel led me to the siddur I was meant to find. The daughter who had originally given me the siddur I lost had now given me another siddur to take its place. This new gift came from the two people in my life who were no longer alive to speak to me: my father and my son.
A small miracle that brings some solace where comfort is rare.
It is most appropriate that we speak of small miracles at this time of Purim, the time of hidden miracles, of nisim nistorim. It is also the time of Ariel’s bar mitzvah, for he was bar mitzvah on Shabbat HaChodesh. We pray that his neshomah, and the neshomah of my father, Rabbi Philip Harris Singer, of blessed memory, should have aliyahs in Gan Eden Shel Maalah.