Warned in a Dream, Awoken to Torah

Almost twenty years have passed since this story happened, but the rabbi who related it will never forget...

In his words...

A Dream and a Warning

I work in an Israeli yeshivah which caters mostly to boys from South America. The boy in this story was just fourteen when I first got to know him, in his first year of yeshivah. He came from Argentina and his family still lived there.

The story, however, begins twelve years before this, when the boy was just two years old. One night, his mother dreamed that her grandmother (who had passed away some years before) came to her and said, "On March 8th, I am coming to take you."

The mother was understandably terrified at this dream and the very next morning she went to a rabbi to ask him what it meant and what she should do.

The rabbi told her, "If your grandmother mentioned only the secular date in the dream [i.e., not the Hebrew month], there's nothing to worry about."

You Want to Raise Them? So Raise Them Well...

Several months passed and March 8th arrived — and the grandmother again appeared to the boy's mother in a dream.

"They want to take you to Heaven," she said.

The mother protested: "But I have young children! Who will raise them?"

The grandmother responded that she would ask about this; she disappeared, and then returned to say, "Your argument is valid. However, you must now commit to raising your children in the path of Torah and mitzvot. You must also ensure they eat only kosher food."

When the mother awoke, she felt certain that this was no ordinary dream. She resolved to commit to living a Torah lifestyle and raising her children accordingly. She was also very careful about only eating and giving them absolutely kosher food.

Heavenly Timing

Twelve years passed, and her son came to learn at our yeshivah. One Shabbat, in the early hours of the morning, the boy's mother dreamed that she saw her son eating non-kosher food. She woke up horrified, but had to wait until after Shabbat to contact him and find out what this meant.

It turned out that on that Shabbat, the son had been at another yeshivah where he ate the Shabbat meals. The meat served had good kosher certification — however, in Argentina, it is customary to inspect a slaughtered animal internally for kosher signs while it's lying down, whereas some kashrut organizations in Eretz Yisrael do the process differently which some consider to result in a lower level of kashrut.

When the mother mentioned the time she woke up from her dream, her son was shocked. It had been half-past-five in the morning in Argentina, corresponding to half-past-eleven in Eretz Yisrael, the exact time he had been eating the meat...

As published in "Divine Providence"