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Matthew 25:40, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

Q: I am writing to you about an experience I had with Divine Intervention about 15 years ago. My church has religious instruction lessons on weekdays after school in the late afternoon. I teach children with special needs. Before I retired, I worked in Jamaica, Queens. My church is in Astoria. My job allowed me to leave an hour early once a week so I could get to church on time to work with these children. About 18 years ago an elderly woman from my church said she had asked the man who delivered hot meals to homebound seniors in her apartment complex what he did with the food that couldn’t be delivered. He said he had to destroy it. She told him not to do that, to give it to her and she would find people to give it to. He agreed. She contacted me because I have a car and my husband and I worked with young people from the projects at the time. She said she would freeze the meals and would call me to come collect it.

One day she called me that her freezer was full and I said I’d be there about 7 p.m. Amazingly, that afternoon the highway was clear and I got from Jamaica to Astoria in record time. Because I had a lot of time before church class began, I decided to go straight to her apartment and collect the food. I then went to church. As I entered the building, I overheard two women talking. One said that her job didn’t pay her for all the hours she worked. She had no money, no food in the house and didn’t know what she was going to feed her son the next day. Immediately I knew why traffic was clear and I said to her that I had something for her. I took her to my car, explained about the food and said it was a gift from God. She was so grateful. To this day, there is no other way to explain why the roads were so clear of traffic that day. – (From L)

A: Dearest, most compassionate, most holy L, there is an old Jewish legend that there are 36 righteous people scattered around the world whose righteousness convinces God every day not to destroy the world. They are all unknown to the world, but they are known to God and if there are ever less than 36, God will destroy the world immediately for the sake of our sinfulness.

I thought of that legend of the 36 this week when I saw the death and devastation caused by the Nepalese/Chinese flood. The sight of that deathly wall of water reminded me of Noah and the flood and amidst my prayers for the souls of the dead and the suffering of the survivors I thought that this might be what the destruction of the world in the time of Noah looked like. I also worried that there might be less than 36 righteous ones in our world now and that the flood was a sign that we are all imperiled.

However, then your glorious email turned up alone in the part of my mailbox usually bereft of notes to me and filled with offers to transfer millions of dollars to me from an unnamed foreign prince. God bless you, L, for being one of the 36 and by the way, thank you for saving the world.

I will always think of you, dear L, as fulfilling one of my favorite New Testament verses, Matthew 25:40, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

The lesson of this luminous passage must never be forgotten. Faith is not as much what we believe as it is what we do. God’s love heals us and we take that love and heal others. That is faith as I understand it and it surely is faith as you have lived it.

God bless you for witnessing your faith in a way that Matthew and Jesus would instantly recognize.

I must say however that I am still not totally convinced that part of God’s omnipotence includes controlling the traffic, but who knows. The next time I have to go to the DMV to renew my driver’s license I am definitely going to say a prayer to God to erase the lines of people ahead of me.

By the way, the miracle was not clearing out the traffic. The miracle was creating you.

(Send ALL QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS to The God Squad via email at godsquadquestion@aol.com. Rabbi Gellman is the author of several books, including “Religion for Dummies,” co-written with Fr. Tom Hartman. Also, the new God Squad podcast is now available.)

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