Don’t be shocked, but I am about to write something complimentary about a New Orleans utility company. This past Sunday, Entergy performed some preventive maintenance in the neighborhood around Tulane University. Hopefully this will help avoid outages to the extent that we have experienced them in recent years. It’s great that Entergy is being proactive, but why does this belong in a Rabbi’s weekly email message? For that I must give you some background.
This maintenance that they performed required Entergy to cut the power to the entire area in which they were operating. Knowing that this was going to be the case, Entergy made phone contact with the occupants of each facility that would be affected by the scheduled outage. A fellow named Barry called and informed me about the outage which was planned for a Thursday. A few minutes later he called back and said that they needed to change the time, and they were looking at Saturday. I explained to him that Saturday would be difficult for us since that is the day we have our Sabbath services, which would be very difficult to hold in the dark. He asked if we had a generator, which we don’t. I explained that we could not even use flashlights and candles because of Shabbat. Barry said that he would suggest to the powers-that-be to move the outage to Sunday. He said that he was not the decision maker and most of those making the decision were keen on Sunday, but he would go to bat for us. The next day he confirmed that he was successful in convincing them to move it to Sunday, which in fact happened this past Sunday. We were able to move our Sunday morning Minyan to a smaller room with more daylight, something we would not have been able to do on Shabbat.
I reflected on the lives that my grandparents lived in the Soviet Union, where Jews had to hide their Shabbat observance or put themselves at risk. How many Jews had to walk to school or work on Saturday, hoping that they could get away with not having to use a pencil or violate Shabbat in some other form? Here we are living in a society where a major utility company is sensitive to the Shabbat observances of a small group of people.
In the 1990s the Rebbe often highlighted the shift in the world to a place where Jewish observance was not only no longer persecuted, but rather it was supported by the societies and governments in which Jewish people lived. The Rebbe pointed to various prophecies that spoke of the days of Redemption as a time when the prominent people of the nations will facilitate the Torah observance of the Jewish people.
We are living in unique times. Jewish people are experiencing the agony and the ecstasy. The agony of the trouble in Israel and the increase in antisemitism; but we also have the ecstasy of so much freedom and support from our society for living proudly as Jews. May we experience the complete redemption very soon through the coming of Mashiach.
Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi Mendel Rivkin