How prayers at Ancestors’ Graves Opened the Way to an Astonishing Encounter

“Do you mean you met Elijah the Prophet?”   

I was giving a sermon at a shtiebel by my brother Baruch’s home in Brooklyn near Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights.  They warned me not to discuss politics, so I told the audience a true story. I once encountered an angel or a spiritual being of some sort.  

When I said this, the people sitting there in shul gave me skeptical looks.  One raised a suspicious eyebrow.  Others made pained faces.  A guy in the third row called out: “Was it Eliyahu Hanavi?”    

 “Maybe.” I said.  “Maybe, because there’s no other way to explain what happened.” 

If there is no rational explanation, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to consider that a supernatural phenomenon took place.  What happened to me was inconceivable, so the most likely explanation was that it was either Elijah the Prophet or a different being that God sent.  My story takes place in a cemetery in Worcester, Massachusetts on the eve of Rosh Hashana 5786.  

Just to provide some background, we know that there is a long-standing custom for Jews to go to cemeteries to visit the graves of loved ones or great sages before the Jewish New Year.  

In fact, the Talmud has an incredible story about this.  Long ago, in a year of famine, a man was out shopping before Rosh Hashana when he came across a poor person who was in need of food.  The man gave the poor person all his money instead of buying the things on his shopping list.  When he returned home,  his wife asked him about her shopping list and saw that he had bought nothing that she had requested.  She was furious.  Where’s the gefilte fish?  When his wife heard that he had given their money to the poor, she threw him out of the house.  With nowhere to go, the man went to the cemetery that night. 

In the cemetery, the pious man heard........

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