ישראל קדושים הם - מעשיות פון הייליגע פשוט'ע אידן

[אנדערער]

באקומען אן אימעיל היינט

Dear Doeihu,

I would like to share an amazing story with you about something I just experienced. I believe that many can gain a lot of chizuk from this.

I work in a very heimishe, ehrliche office with over one hundred employees, most of whom are women. In my location, there are only women. We have a very strong filter on the computers, the strongest one possible that still allows us to perform our work. Two days ago, the internet started making issues. It started working very slow, and then it stopped fully. At first, we thought that the internet in the whole area was slow, and everything would be resolved in a few minutes, but after a while we realized it was something more serious.

The IT department sent out an email explaining that the issue was with the filter (This was a technical issue that we hadn’t experienced before; the filter was working very well until then with no issues). They were trying to resolve the issue, and they hoped we would be able to work again soon. Time passed, hour by hour, and the internet still didn't work. The manager went around telling everyone we could go home, and hopefully we’d be back at work the next day.

But the next day, the internet still wasn’t working.

Every few minutes, we tried reloading our pages, and the internet was working on and off. IT kept on pushing us off on when the issue would be resolved. They tried several ways to resolve the issue, but none of them worked. After a few hours, they told us again that we could all go home, and hopefully by tomorrow things would work better. Familiar words!

To explain, the issue was only with the filter. The internet worked perfectly fine without the filter, and even with a lower-level filter the internet was working completely fine. But our boss insisted that he would not allow his workers to work with a low-level filter, or worse, without a filter at all. He'd rather take the loss of over one hundred employees not working for almost 2 days than have them do their work not in the most kosher way.

Finally, by the end of the second day, the IT department informed us that each computer would get a new, individual filter. The next day, we went in, and the computers were working fine. The in-house IT guy went around to fix any issues that might come up, and finally we were all back to work.

Our boss made it clear to us that we would all get paid for the hours we didn't work, plus he would pay time and a half for every employee who worked overtime to get the backlog of work done as soon as possible. And this was all to our benefit, so that we wouldn't have to work without the most kosher filter!

But that wasn’t all. Towards the end of the day, we received an email from our boss, thanking us for bearing with him in this hard time. He then sent us to the kitchen to grab some refreshments. As if it was our loss that the internet was not working, not his!

Hashem should repay him for the huge kiddush Hashem he made and mesiras nefesh he presented.

This story is not about a person who benefited significantly (in this world, a benefit we can see) from staying true to their values when faced with a nisayon. Rather, it is intended as a lesson to all of us about remaining devoted to the Ribono Shel Olam and His Torah, regardless of the physical consequences that may happen as a result, simply because this is what Hashem wants from us. It is the way a Yid is required to behave. A real “success story”!