“Preacher, the Rabbi sailed down the ICW…” Came Smokey’s voice over the radio. “… He has no sailing experience!!!  He’s gonna get himself and all of us killed.   We are all gonna DIE!!!… My crew and I are turning back right now.”   

“Smokey, I’ve made this trip many times.   We’ve had some head winds for three days, and we are goi’n against the gulf stream current, but it should get better soon as the winds change, and we head down the windward passage… Don’t know, what ya think…” Explained the Captain.

My blood rose to a level I had never experienced before.  I was at a loss for words.   Then a memory came to me; I was about 5 years old.  My Grandma was there staring at me with tears in her eyes while I as playing.  I was entertaining my self as I always did, when I got tired of playing with my toys;   I carved out a piece of wood into the shape of a boat, and spent hours rigging a little sailboat.   I was not satisfied until it was so perfectly balanced that it could actually sail on its own.   And sail it did, as I lost all of the sailboats I made because I had no way of turning them back when I put them in the ocean…

“Your Grandfather would have loved you…” I recall my grandma’s words.   “He had a three mast schooner, and he always wanted a son to teach him how to sail… He never had a son, and he died long before you were born… When your mon was still a girl…” She continued.  “And here you are, making sailboats that work, and no one has ever taught you how to do that…   It’s as if your Grandfather is in you…”

I then remember  how thrilling it was later as a teenager, getting into a real sailboat, and actually controlling it for the first time, as if I had done it all my life.  

… Perhaps I was in such shock, that I temporarily shut down to moments in my childhood.

Then I came to my senses and thought:  “Wait a minute!!! This trip has nothing to do with my sailing ability…”

“Captain,” I interjected, “I’m not sure why we’re talking on a side Channel, discussing things that affect everyone.  And by the way, we are not here because of our sailing abilities; we are here because G-d called us to go on this journey to bring Torah to Haiti… And Smokey,”  I continued, “We are not going to die! Ad-nai is with us.”

“There’s a storm coming!!!” Shouted Smokey, “You’al can go’n and die.   We are turning this vessel around and heading back.  My crew is 100% behind me!”

After everything we had suffered and even lost, here we were so close…

“Smokey! It’s not the storms going forward that we need to be worried about, it’s the storms we’ll face going backwards that concern me…”

To be continued