Yom Kippur at Publix

Wheeling my cart through an aisle after interrupting a stocker several times for this and that, I finally saw on my list that I needed a Yahrzeit candle, a small glass filled with white wax to memorialize the death of a relative. On October 27 Caryn Hope would have turned 60. I think to myself what wondrous father and daughter conversations we would have. She took her own life in 1998.

Living in Athens, Alabama, a nondescript community which according to the census has no Jews in it -- except perhaps for me, I often had to search diligently for a candle and sometimes special order it. A sweetheart of a store manager got Hanukah candles for me for the season years ago from another Publix.

And so I asked the stocker for religious candles, knowing that was the best he could grasp for such an offbeat item. Last time I found it in the aisle with Asian foodstuffs and matzoh ball soup.

As I went on my search, a woman, in her late fifties, chubby and blond-haired came running up to me and in her hand was a Yahrzeit candle. Her face had joy in it.

Smiling, she told me she overheard my conversation with the stocker and knew what I wanted and handed it to me. I caught myself, I remember, because I was moved. What a thoughtful kindness I was experiencing. After catching my breath, I told her she had done a mitzvah, explaining that in Yiddish it meant a good deed. I was moved once more and she left.

With this incident in mind I prowled in the next aisle and she caught up with me once more and this time drew closer. She said she had a close Jewish friend living in Ohio and something about his owning a well-known store. I was not quite sure but I felt she just wanted to make contact of some sort. Much that she felt she did not share but I discerned that.

In the Jewish tradition, with its rich value systems, after 5785 years old, the concept of tikkun olum emerged as an ethical value, roughly meaning to repair the world. I said to her while giving her my business card that she go to my website and choose whatever book I had written and I would gift her with it. A book was most fitting.

We said goodbye. I haven't heard from her as yet but it was the sweetest Yom Kippur I ever had in 84 years, one of milk and honey. In hindsight I also felt that I was a rara avis, as if she were a birder who had come upon in the woods an endangered species. In today's world, I am endangered, the center doesn't hold. On my door jamb is a mezuzah, a declaration to the world. If you come for me, I'll be ready. Here I stand!