On Chol Ha'Moed, we were in a car service on our way to a bris. In the pocket of the seat in front of me, I saw a book. I pulled it out and saw it was a sefer and it had a name written in it, in Hebrew. Of all topics, the sefer was about bris mila!
We asked the driver about it and he said it was there for a week and nobody had called. I told him I would take the book and see if I could return it.
The person had four names plus a last name. Two of the names were Efraim Fishel. When I took out a local phone book to see how many people there were with that last name, I saw there weren't too many. One name that stood out was Fishel. Although that was only one of the four names and the last one, I decided to call that one.
The wife answered and she said, yes, her brother-in-law had borrowed the sefer. I was glad to have hit upon the owner on my first try and we concluded that someone would pick it up.
Since I had access to a car yesterday, one of my stops was to return the sefer. It was a good feeling to have completed the mitzva of hashovas aveida - I didn't want to wait for someone to get around to calling me and picking it up. It's also a good feeling that it's a "small world," and I can easily find a fellow Jew and return his sefer.
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We are one family. I was on a bus in Ramat Beit Shemesh a few months ago with my daughter-in-law and granddaughter. My daughter-in-law ended up holding the baby of a woman that she didn't know and at every stop, one woman would collect the bus cards to run through the meter. I couldn't imagine that happening here in America because most people don't trust strangers with their baby or their bus cards.
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