יהיה בסדר Y'hiyeh B'seder

Don’t worry if you lock your food in and yourselves out on Shabbos…y’hiyeh b’seder (it will be ok).

So last night, I and nine others were supposed to be having Shabbat dinner at a fellow Pardesnik’s apartment. We arrived, only to discover that our host had accidentally taken the wrong key with him to synagogue, and we were all locked out. Poor Dave ran all over Baka and the German Colony knocking on doors, trying to figure out the address of the apartment where his roommate was eating dinner, so he could get a key (the rest of us sat in the stairwell and told ghost stories).

When Dave finally came back without success, we came up with a contingency plan. Luckily, we had wine, challah and dessert with us since guests had brought them, so we moved our dinner party to one of the guest’s apartments. A quiche that was supposed to be for today’s lunch, some leftovers, a thrown-together salad, someone else ran home to get leftover rice, and we had a wonderful meal. It was pretty funny when the apartment-mate of our impromptu hostess came home to find all eleven of us sitting around her table eating dessert and singing!

Throughout dinner, we shared stories of times in our lives where things weren’t going according to plan and of when things just fell into place. Grad school rejection letters, getting lost, bad jobs, seemingly unfair orders from supervisors...in the end, things turned out right. In the parsha (Torah portion) we read this morning, things didn’t exactly happen according to plan, either. A dying Yaakov (Jacob) gives his younger grandson, Ephriam, the blessing reserved for the firstborn, Menashe. Yosef (Joseph) tries to correct his father, to no avail. Sometimes things don’t happen the way they’re “supposed” to happen. Y’hiyeh b’seder.