It was outside Schwartz's bakery on Fairfax Ave. that I first saw him do it while I waited in my car for my wife to finish Shabbos shopping. As I watched the erev Shabbat [Sabbath evening] crowd go by, my attention was drawn to a poorly dressed young woman pushing an old market wagon, filled with bundles of rags, paper bags, and whatever else goes into living hand to mouth.
A small child sat cushioned in the wagon, and another kid walked alongside her. Passengers in poverty.
Coming from the opposite direction was this man whom I recognized. As he passed her, he turned around suddenly and called out something to get her attention. I didn't hear what. When she turned, he pretended to be picking up some money. Green it was, how much wasn't meant for me to know.
He motioned that she had dropped it, and quickly put it in the child's lap and was gone.
It was less than a month later, while I waited at the checkout counter at Ralph's market, that I saw that man again. He was standing behind an alte bubbie [old grandmother] who was counting out her pennies to pay for her milk and bread.
He didn't see me, but I saw him as he bent down and came up holding a twenty in his hand, all the while saying that the bubbie had dropped it. She said "no, it wasn't hers." Everybody in the line urged her to take it, and she did.
Now when anyone is lucky enough to see an act of kindness, it makes for good feelings. Trouble was that I never liked this man until now.
God gave two eyes to see. The right one to see the good in others, and the left to see the fault in ourselves.
I see better now.
— Howard Weiss, Yom Kippur Readings by Dov Peretz Elkins, editor