This past week I had the incredible opportunity to travel with a large group of my peers on Kollel to Yad Eliezer. For those of you who don’t know (which I myself did not until that day), Yad Eliezer is an organization dedicated to helping those in need by preparing and delivering boxes filled with different foods as well as any other items these people may require. For the short hour we were there, it was our job to assemble, pack, and wrap as many of these boxes as we could. Every person was assigned to a different station along one long assembly line. The boxes were put together at the beginning, taped up at the end, and along the middle, one person was assigned to pack a specific item into each box.
I was assigned (probably the most important) job of packing the body wash. Like everyone else, I started off excited and enthusiastic about my job. One by one I filled boxes with those ever so important bottles. But after a while I began to ask myself, “What is it that I’m actually doing? In what way is it relevant? How big of a difference can this seemingly tiny and insignificant contribution actually make?” Of course this didn’t stop me from doing my job. I kept packing those body wash bottles until we ran completely out of time. That’s when I finally looked up and saw the over 250 boxes we had prepared (despite the few technical difficulties that had slowed us down along the way) being wrapped up and prepared for delivery. It was then I realized that while the contribution that I, as well as everyone else, had made may have been small on its own, when put together we managed to make a difference large enough to affect the lives of over 250 people. Even making the smallest contribution whenever you have the change can end up taking part in the largest differences.
– Nachi Fleischaeker (Memphis, TN; 2nd year on Kollel)