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Short Summary
Main recommendation: Keep trusting Hashem and keep doing your best every day, even when your efforts seem fruitless, because you cannot see the full plan. Rabbi Fischel Schachter illustrates this with a family story about a cousin in Australia who revealed his father's hidden history 75 years after the war, and with a parable about a man who kept drawing water from a bucket with holes because the king told him to.
Key Points
- Rabbi Schachter was unexpectedly contacted by a cousin in Australia he had not known existed, which led him to learn family history he had never heard.
- His father rarely spoke about his siblings, who were killed by the Germans in the first week of the war, and the speaker only learned their names through this encounter.
- The father had left Lodz to study in Lithuanian yeshivas, then went back to Poland and found his parents and brother Moshe hiding in a bunker; his parents urged him to flee alone since they were too weak, and his brother chose to stay with them.
- The speaker presents the meeting as evidence that events happen for reasons unseen at the time, since his own existence depends on this story.
- The parable of the king and the holed buckets frames the message: a person may not understand why they are struggling, but doing one's best remains the right response.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions: The speaker gives no step-by-step method. The actionable advice is to plan and do your best, to try to be the best person you can be every single day, and to trust Hashem when your plans do not work out.
- The father, Leah and Michel's only child, had been an only child and lost his family in the war; the speaker had been told he had no cousins.
- The cousin, an elderly woman living about five blocks from where the speaker was staying in Australia, told him that his father's parents were Yaakov Lipa and Sara Golda, and his brother was Moshe.
- The father's escape route ran from Vilna across Russia to Japan as part of an organized rescue effort, after he had earlier traveled from Lodz to Lithuania to study.
- The parable's king says he had ten thousand buckets that needed rinsing, which is why he assigned the task.
Bottom Line
Hidden purpose often reveals itself only much later, so the speaker urges steady faithful effort rather than frustration when life does not unfold as planned.
