Not too long ago in the shtetl of Astoria, Queens, a woman walked energetically around her second-floor apartment. Shabbos was fast approaching, and Rabbi Miriam was busy getting all the sources together for that night’s sermon. She had really “phoned it in” the previous week and knew she needed to balance it out with something of substance this time around. As the old rabbinical adage goes, “for every two for the schnooks, write one for the books!”
It was an early spring day in Astoria. The sky had just given up the perpetual gray of winter. There was just enough of a kiss of warmth to the air that she had decided to open a window. Rabbi Miriam lived on the second floor of a two-story row home in the upper forties of 30th Avenue. Her landlords, George and Mary Oikonomou, were an older Greek couple who lived on the floor below. They were kind people who would always turn the heat on in the building early in the season.
As Miriam jostled energetically from her bedroom to her office with a stack of various commentaries of the Tanakh piled high, a gust of wind came in through the open living room window. It was strong enough to tip over the rather wordy and hefty Phonetic Translation. The disjointed stack threw off Rabbi Miriam’s balance to the point of having to stand awkwardly on one foot while trying not to drop anything. Her downfall came the moment the high-gloss-covered Folger’s Torah Commentary...
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