Returning from Strasbourg, I attended a Shabbat service in a synagogue in the Dutch city of Breda. After the service and meal, a conversation with the chairman of the local community and my neighbor Philip Susan was a kind of echo of the Strasbourg episode. He sadly complained that the "halachic" Jews threaten him with their departure from the community if their non-Jewish friends and non-proselytes were not allowed to pray with everyone in a minyan, on common law. So, do we have a hobby club or a house of prayer? And again the same enduring question:

To be or not to be ?! To stay or stay? May, with the help of Gd, everyone who truly wants to join the holy people will have enough strength and fulfill and listen, and be, and remain.

May the Almighty bless all of them and make them strong, strong and even stronger. For life and for the world. Forever and ever.

A distant close friend of mine, Marina Kalinina, a lively Komsomol girl without age, a kind heart, a lifesaver. I met her on a street where a rivulet with the cheerful name Tarakanovka once flowed.

Having gone through various periods of formations and downfalls in our Soviet country, it remained afloat. I got up in the bay of the former design institute, "split" into many different premises, leased for different firms and firms.

She called her firm “Wellness Center” and for years she continued this business, experiencing more adversity than success.

Then, in 1989, she met me at this street Tarakanovka, freed, who had gone through a "small circle" of walking through the agony of different camps and prisons. I stood confused, in slippers, from the colony, in outdated things six years ago, awkward, with a trash can, as if not yet conscious of where I was. Then, in May 1989, she showed genuine kindness and sympathy to me, communicating simply and openly.

This is how she stayed for me. For ten years we have not seen each other, only occasionally calling back. And only in the next century, 13-14 years after the first meeting, it happened to us to meet again.

I hope these conversations were as enjoyable for her as they were for me. One thing clearly worried her, though. She could not in any way process the thought that I, in every next meeting, strikingly, in her opinion, change. She could not believe in sincerity and see the pattern. Being very good about this man, I wrote the following parable for her.

The old gardener could no longer work on his garden and went to live in the city.

He settled in one of the slums of a huge gray city. Once cleaning his old coat, he reached into his pocket and found there old dried grains. Yes, ordinary seeds. Only those seeds were all different, from different plants, and from which – the old man could no longer know.

– Well, I'll plant them in our yard, we'll see what grows.

The old man took these seeds and, on a piece of earth, exposed from the swollen and cracked asphalt, planted them in the soil.

The old man lived in a house that stood face to face to another house. Houses were also crowded on the sides. "Well" – that was the name of these courtyards in that huge, damp city.

The sun barely broke through the walls – in this country sunny days were rare – only in the evening hours before sunset did it manage to touch the ground and warm the sprouts that were making their way.

As time passed, the plants grew, and at first they hardly differed from each other. All were gray and faded.

Then, after some time, one could already distinguish the emerging thistle, a bush that took the shape of a nettle, a frail aspen. One tree remained unrecognized.

From the very beginning, they tried to push this plant incomprehensible to others, to block it from the life-giving light.

The thistle pricked with thorns, other plants burned, cast a shadow, strangled the young shoot with their roots. But the tree continued to live.

Thin and dusty, it reached for the light, greedily grabbing the rare rays of the sun.

It was unsightly: some branches were broken off by passers-by and the wind, some leaves, not having time to straighten out, wilted, the bark cracked from lack of moisture.

But here's a miracle: that incomprehensible force that sat in the seed, pushed and pushed the growth of the tree up to the sun.

It was changing all the time: it seemed like an unnecessary shrub, then, releasing fresh green leaves again, pleased the eye.

The gardener has already lost interest in all of his plantings. I forgot about them and even stopped watering.