Suddenly I remembered Dani’s bar mitzvah. I had sent him an email congratulating him, but now I was seeing him in person for the first time since then so I wished him a hearty mazel tov and told him again that I was sorry that I wasn’t able to come. I asked him how long ago it was, and I must admit that I was quite surprised when they said it was just over a year. I suddenly remembered that I had planned on buying him a bar mitzvah present and never did.
“Dani,” I said, “I wanted to buy you a book for your bar mitzvah but the truth is, I forgot all about it. I’d still like to buy it for you. Is there any particular book you’d like?”
I had recently bought a wonderful book for a friend’s grandson, an amazing book about Shabbos by Rabbi Shimshon Dovid Pincus, zt”l. It was in Hebrew and cost about forty five shekel. That’s a very good bar mitzvah present as well as a fantastic present for anyone, so normally I would have bought that book for Dani without asking him what he wanted, but since I knew that he and his family made aliyah only a few years ago, I wasn’t sure how good his Hebrew reading was. I asked him and discovered that I was right to assume that he would prefer a book in English. I asked him if there was anything special he wanted on a particular subject and right away he knew what he wanted. There was a specific book that he had seen in a store just last week. He wanted to buy it but for some reason he didn’t. I asked him what book it was and he told me that it was a book of stories about Yerushalayim, particularly the very old, religious neighborhood of Meah Shearim, and it was by Chaim Walder. As the author is very popular, I thought to myself that it should be fairly easy to get the book for him.
We reached the hospital, and after exchanging cell phone numbers with his mother in case our times of returning to Har Nof coordinated, I told her that if it doesn’t work out perfectly for her, she should just leave and I’ll take a bus home. After a couple of hours, against all odds, we managed to meet and go back together. Suddenly I had an idea.
“Can you go back via Beit Hadfus Street?” I asked Dani’s mother.
“Sure,” she said.
“Great! Then if you don’t mind waiting just a few minutes, can you park outside the bookstore there, and I’ll jump in and get the book for Dani and give it to him now?”
“Sure!” she said, “If you really want to.”
“Yes, I want to,” I said, “you’ll be doing me a favor so that I won’t have to make a special trip to the store and then to your house.”
She parked right outside the religious bookstore. I got out, went in, told them the name and author of the book and was then directed to the English books where I would find just what Dani wanted. Baruch Hashem, they had the exact book, and I went to the counter to have it gift wrapped and to pay.
“How much is it?” I asked casually, expecting it to be around the same price as lots of other bar mitzvah books, around forty to fifty shekel.
“It’s a hundred and fifteen,” the man at the register told me.
“Really?” I asked, quite surprised by the price.
