We say every day in our morning Tefila, “ה’ הושיע המלך יעננו ביום קראנו – Hashem save us, the King who answers on the day we call out to Him.” We are supposed to feel that we can be helped with an immediate salvation. The very same day we call out in prayer, Hashem could help us. Sometimes, we are put into situations where we can’t wait even one more day for a yeshua. If that happens, we should not despair. Rather, we should pray with the recognition that Hashem could help us on the spot.
A woman told me that, a few years ago she had a cataract in both eyes. She went to a great Rabbi before getting a surgery. The Rabbi told her, “Although this is usually a routine procedure, you should make sure to get a top specialist to do the surgery.” At that time, she didn’t have a good health insurance provider. She told her husband they needed to upgrade to have a better choice of doctors to choose from. They paid a lot to the provider and had to wait to get the surgery, but eventually, it was done by one of the premier doctors in New York City in this field. For the next two years, she went once a year to her local optometrist to check and make sure everything was okay. By then, she and her husband decided to go back to the cheaper insurance provider.
A year later, at her annual check-up, the optometrist told her she was in imminent danger of losing her eyesight. The normal eye pressure ranges from 12-22 mm Hg; her’s was over 50. She had a certain form of glaucoma which needed immediate attention. The optometrist recommended a few doctors to perform the surgery she needed. The problem was, none of them accepted her health insurance. She called some organizations who help in these types of situations, but they all said they can’t help in such a short amount of time. The cost for the type of surgery she needed would be in the tens of thousands of dollars, something they could not afford. Her only choice, they recommended, was to go to a clinic and use a surgeon there. Time was of the essence, so they went to a clinic and hoped for the best. There were long lines of people there who had been waiting since 6:00 in the morning. It looked like she would be there for hours and then, maybe, get someone professional enough to do this delicate surgery. She sat there in the waiting room and began to think. She said to herself, “There is really nothing else I can do at this point. We don’t have the money. These are the doctors available to us now. Hashem, I’m in Your hands. You are the One who heals, anyway. Please, give me the right messenger to do this job.” A few minutes later, the expert doctor who did her cataract surgery “happened” to be walking by, through that clinic, to get to the elevators. The woman hurried and caught up to him as he entered the elevator. She said, “Remember me? You did the surgery on my eyes a few years ago.” Then she added, “Now I need an emergency surgery for my glaucoma.”
He then said to her, “I am the one who developed the best method for doing the surgery that you need now. In fact, I go around teaching other surgeons how to do it as well. Why didn’t you come to me?”
The woman replied, “I don’t have the health insurance provider that you take any more and I can’t afford it.”
The doctor said, “For this surgery, I don’t take any insurance, but because I just met you through Divine providence, I’m going to do it for you for very cheap. It can wait until the morning, come first thing tomorrow and I’ll do it for $3000.” The woman was elated, Hashem answered her tefila on the spot. She went the next day and, baruch Hashem, the surgery was a success.
Afterward, as she was recovering in the waiting room, she met another religious lady there who was saying, “This is the best doctor, right? My husband is getting surgery right now.”
The woman said, “Yeah, he is, but it would be even better it we didn’t have to pay.” She ended up telling the woman the story of how she ended up here and the discount she was getting. But then she added, “It was still a struggle for me to pay it.”
When she was finally ready to leave, she went to pay and the secretary told her, “Don’t worry, it’s been taken care of.” It turned out, that lady in the waiting room was very wealthy and had paid her bill without even telling her.
The woman said, “Not only didn’t I have to get the surgery in a clinic, Hashem gave me the top doctor who invented the surgery on it, for free. At this point,” she said, “I also understood why the Rabbi wanted me to get the best doctor to do the surgery.
ה’ הושיע המלך יעננו ביום קראנו – Hashem could save us on the same day we call out to Him.
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