The Zohar tells us that sometimes we are sent an angel in the form of someone in need to give us the opportunity to extend kindness and thereby avert a judgment or chaos that was perhaps heading our way.
I have a personal story that attests to this.
Once, when the Rav and I were in our apartment, someone knocked on our door and asked us for bread. It was interesting that this person didn’t ask for money; simply bread. So we went to the kitchen and gathered all the bread we had, making sandwiches and packing everything very carefully. We had a feeling, though, that how we handled this request was important. It was as if our intuition was telling us that this person wasn’t just a human being.
A few moments after the person left, we turned to each other and said, “Why didn’t we offer money?”I remember the Rav ran downstairs to find the person so we could offer money, but the individual had disappeared from sight.
I see this as an encounter with an angel, one who came here to give us an opportunity to see if we would share.
These kinds of things do indeed happen, not just to me but to everyone. It’s just that most of the time we aren’t even aware of the opportunity standing in front of us.
