Give the Dollar. You Never Know Who’s Watching

A few years ago, my family was vacationing in my hometown of Boston when Arielle asked me to run into Walgreens to pick something up.

As I went to pay, the woman behind the counter asked me if I would like to make a $1 donation to the Red Cross.

To be honest, I was in a rush. I wasn't really paying attention, and I am usually a little suspicious of these kinds of checkout donations. So I politely said, "No, thank you" and handed her my credit card.

Suddenly, a hand reached out from behind me, slammed a dollar bill onto the counter, and a voice said, "I'll cover his donation."

Startled, I turned around. Standing behind me, with a huge grin on his face, was the rabbi of my shul.

I will never forget what he said next: "Philip, give the dollar. You never know who's watching you."

There is a fascinating mitzvah in the Torah called Shikcha. In an agricultural society, there were three mitzvot that ensured that those who were less fortunate would have access to the produce of the fields.

Leket requires a farmer to leave behind individual stalks of grain that fall during the harvest.

Peah requires a farmer to leave the corner of his field for the poor.

But Shikcha is different. If a farmer harvests his field and accidentally forgets a bundle of grain, he is not permitted to go back and retrieve it. He must leave it behind for those in need.

At first glance, Shikcha seems like a very strange mitzvah. With Peah, I know what I am doing. I intentionally leave the corner of my field. With Leket, I am at least aware that the grain has fallen, and I make the conscious decision not to pick it up.

But with Shikcha, I don't even know that I've done anything. I forget a bundle, walk away, go home and may never realize that I left anything behind. And yet, that forgotten bundle becomes a mitzvah.

The Sifrei takes this idea even further. If a person loses a coin and a poor person finds it and benefits from it, the person who lost the coin receives credit as though he had given tzedakah.

Think about how strange that is. Imagine I'm walking down the street and a dollar falls out of my pocket. At that moment, I'm not a philanthropist. I'm a klutz. If the dollar rolls into a drain and disappears, I'm simply an unlucky guy with a hole in his pocket. But if that same dollar is found by someone who needs it, something remarkable happens. Without intending to.

Without knowing about it and without ever meeting the person who found it, I have performed an act of tzedakah.

Why? Perhaps Shikcha is teaching us something profound about the impact we have on other people. We tend to think that our influence comes from the things we intentionally do. We give a class, offer advice, make a donation or invite someone for Shabbos. Certainly, those moments matter.

But Shikcha reminds us that there is another kind of influence, an influence that happens completely outside our awareness.

Think about that farmer. He wakes up early in the morning, makes breakfast for his children, packs their lunches and heads out to the fields. He greets the watchman, waves to the other workers and spends the entire day laboring under the hot sun. At the end of the day, he comes home exhausted and feels that his day was long, difficult and largely unremarkable.

But he doesn't know what happened in his field that afternoon. He doesn't know that he overlooked a bundle of grain, that a poor person discovered it, and that this forgotten bundle may have made a meaningful difference in that person’s life. The farmer may go to sleep that night believing that he simply worked another long day, But he has no idea what impact he had.

Our lives are no different. We get up early, work hard, answer emails, sit in meetings, run errands and take care of endless responsibilities. We smile at the custodian, thank the security guard, make small talk with a coworker, hold the door open for someone and say hello to someone in shul. We come home exhausted and still push ourselves to sit with our children, help with homework or simply spend a few minutes together. And sometimes, at the end of the day, we wonder: What did I actually accomplish today?

Shikcha reminds us that we have no idea. We don't know what our smile meant to someone who was having a difficult day, what our patience meant to the person who was struggling, and the long-term impact of the time we spent with our children. We don't even know who is watching us when we think nobody is.

Rav Avraham Pam, the legendary Rosh Yeshiva of Torah Vodaas, once began a Friday morning shmuess by telling his students that they should all prepare themselves to become rebeim.

There was an uncomfortable feeling in the room. After all, these young men were preparing for many different careers. Some would go into medicine. Some into law. Some into business. Some would continue learning Torah. Not all of them would become rebeim, in the conventional sense, and Rav Pam understood that.

After a pause, he explained: "Of course, you will all enter different professions. But wherever you go, every Jew is a rebbe. At work, you are a rebbe. In the supermarket, you are a rebbe. In every business transaction, you are a rebbe. And in the way you speak to other people, you are a rebbe."

Because whether we realize it or not, we are constantly teaching through the way we live and we never know who is watching.

This may help us understand a remarkable statement of the Gemara in Sanhedrin:

ג' באין בהיסח הדעת, אלו הן - משיח, מציאה ועקרב.

Three things come when one is not thinking about them: Mashiach, a lost object, and a scorpion.

The Gemara says that Mashiach will come b'hesech hadaas, when we are not thinking about it. But how can that be? We are constantly davening and yearning for the redemption? We daven for it in the Shemoneh and say, "L'yeshuascha kivinu kol hayom," we await Your salvation all day. How can the redemption then possibly come through hesech hadaas?

Maybe hesech hadaas means that redemption is built not only through the grand, dramatic things we consciously do, but also through the countless small acts of goodness whose impact we will never fully know. I may have been a kind word whose impact we never saw, a Shabbos invitation that we thought was just another invitation, or through a $1 donation at Walgreens.

We are all rebeim. We are all influencing other people. We never know who is watching, and we never know the impact that even our smallest actions might have.

So do the right thing even when you think nobody will notice. Because often, the most meaningful things we do are the ones we never even realize we did.