Chaim (not his real name) was walking down the street, feeling very discouraged. It seemed that lately, the news was filled with stories depicting the disparities, distrust and dislike between the different streams of Jews living in Israel. Much of it revolved around the different religious affiliations or non-affiliations that people adhered to. There were times when Chaim felt the situation was hopeless, with no way to bring people together as a cohesive group – despite their differences.
Suddenly something caught Chaim’s attention, giving him hope for the future.
He was passing by an area where cars were densely parked along both sides of the street. In the distance, he saw a policeman checking the status of the parked cars.
Some people used a small computerized parking device that was pre-set to pay for the period of time their car would be parked there. Others simply placed coins inside the nearby parking meters. When neither method was used, or if the time period paid for parking had elapsed, the policeman whipped out his pad of parking tickets, wrote up the car’s details, and placed a ticket against the windshield where the unlucky car owner would find it upon his return.
Out of the corner of his eye, Chaim saw a blur of black. An older man, dressed in chassidic garb, was jingling a handful of coins. He stopped at the cars furthest away from the policeman, and checked each one. When he found a car that would soon be receiving a parking ticket, he quickly fed some coins into the nearby parking meter to ensure that the car was still legally parked.
In this fashion, he kept walking toward the busy policeman.
The policeman, a non-religious Jew, smiled at the older man. Suddenly he called out to the chassid. “Here! Quickly!” The two men now worked in tandem, trying to see to it that no car owner would return to a ticketed car.
Chaim, with a knitted kippah on his head, felt a surge of hope. Perhaps both men were very different, like two sides of a coin, but they also had many things that tied them together – because underneath it all, they were two sides of the same coin.