A relative of mine, let’s call him Yoni, recently put together a video for his father Shua’s 70th birthday. He emailed a bunch of people asking for short clips wishing his father mazel tov and sharing memories. He reached out to people individually, not in some mass blast, which already tells you something about how much this mattered to him.
We sent in a clip of our kids singing some cute version of happy birthday, and I didn’t think much more of it. A few days later Yoni sent out the finished video. About 20 minutes, all these little clips stitched together. I’m watching, there’s a cousin, a mutual friend, and then a big tzaddik shows up. A known Rav, posek, mashpia, apparently a childhood friend of Shua’s from around 55 years back. He spoke slowly. He’d clearly thought about it beforehand. He shared a memory, chose his words carefully, wished Shua a long and happy life, straight from the heart.
This is not a man with spare time. He’s got a shul, a phone that doesn’t stop, people lined up with real problems. But for a few minutes, an old friend from decades ago got to be the only person in the world.
That’s the piece I keep coming back to. Not that he made time. Plenty of us make time. It’s that he gave undivided time.
Another story won’t hurt. A friend of mine once spoke with Rav Elyashiv ztz’l about something. It was a two minute meeting (it was literally a 2-minute slot, as scheduled by the Rav’s gabbai). The part he remembered most about it was, for those two minutes, Rav Elyashiv focused entirely on him, and he felt that nothing else existed in the world.
I don’t speak for anyone else, but I need to do better with this. I need to learn how to give people undivided attention. I need to learn how to give my gemara undivided attention. I need to learn how to give Hashem — at least during davening — undivided attention, rather than composing a mental to-do list with a tallis on.
Yom Kippur is the right time to practice. After all, we’re not eating, not drinking, not doing much of anything except standing before Hashem and asking to be seen. We want His undivided attention, and we have a good shot to give Him that as well, for one full day, or for as much of it as we can.
It might seem like a small thing to work on. But maybe it’s one of those big small things.
This article was found in Nekuda Tova Issue 99.
