‘Tis the Season for a Mitzvah

from Education Choices Magazine - Winter 2024

Supported to Succeed

Doing good deeds for others

I got the idea for The Christmas Mitzvah in 1996, on a Christmasseason working trip to Milwaukee, from an article in the local daily newspaper.

Here’s the true story that sat in my desk drawer for more than two decades: in late-1960s Milwaukee lived a gentleman named Al Rosen. Al was Jewish, but he also loved the Christmas season. What was not to love? His Christian friends and neighbors were in their happiest time of the year. The snow, the decorations, the lights and the carols were beautiful and everyone just seemed nicer. On Christmas Eve, circa 1969, Al met a gas station attendant who had to work that night instead of being with his family. Al was incensed. This was ungodly; a man should be able to celebrate the most important family holiday with his family. Al was so incensed, in fact, that he went home and called a radio station, which put his call on the air:

“I’m Al Rosen, and I’m Jewish. If you have to work tonight on

Christmas Eve and would rather be with your family, I’ll do your job for you. For nothing.”

The radio station switchboard lit up.

Then, for the next thirty years, Al did the same thing - he took on the job of a man or woman who otherwise could not be home with their families on Christmas Eve. Nothing glamorous, quite the opposite, in fact. He shoveled snow, shined shoes, cleaned cages, parked cars, took tolls and mopped floors. His good deeds on Christmas Eve were the epitome of the Christmas spirit. What’s more, people of other faiths also started doing the same on holy days for their friends and neighbors.

To me, that was just about the greatest story I had ever heard. It was the epitome of a mitzvah. What’s a mitzvah? It’s the Hebrew word הָוְצִמ for what the Almighty asks us to do. Yes, it’s a good deed of some kind, but it is also something that God wants of us. It has a holy component to it, which makes it even more special.

Al was doing Christmas mitzvahs (the plural in Hebrew is mitzvot, for the purists among us). Plus, the article I tore out was bittersweet. It was the year that Al Rosen had grown too old to do his Christmas mitzvah. That fact made the greatest story I ever heard even greater. All I had to do was figure out a way to tell it and find a publisher for it.

“Too sentimental.”

“Just not right.”

“A little too old-fashioned.”

“Too religious.”

Those were the responses to my manuscript - disappointing to me, for sure - until Marissa Moss at Creston said: “I love it. Let’s do it.”

I chose to make The Christmas Mitzvah inspired by a true story. It says so, right up front. I’ve got no specific basis that Al did the Christmas mitzvahs exactly as

I wrote them, nor for the book’s concluding section, when the families for whom Al did his mitzvahs come back in Al’s old age to do a remarkable mitzvah for him. In reality, that never happened. But, considering Al’s life, it could and should have.

Do you know what? It didn’t matter that the book was ‘inspired by’ instead of ‘based on’ or ‘a true story’. My readers see it as a kind of truth, I suspect because the message is wholly true in our hearts. My favorite line in the text is about the people for whom Al did his mitzvahs: “All the folks easy to dismiss in a world that mistakes wealth for worth.”

Not all of us can be brain surgeons, astronauts, Wimbledon champions, presidents, inventors, great dancers, speechwriters or horticulturalists. But all of us can do mitzvahs, and there’s no better time than the Christmas season to do them.

JEFF GOTTESFELD Author www.jeffgottesfeldwriter.com