Priorities: Business or Clients?
Providing good customer service is an important part of any successful business. However, to what extent should a company be ready to accommodate a client's request or perhaps absorb a financial loss? What if the loss came as a result of extraneous circumstances such as a pandemic which is beyond the control of the business or the client?
A Little Bit of Light
Olga Fin shared the story of her mother's arrival at Auschwitz and how she would count the days until Shabbat. Every Friday, she crafted two small candles from the margarine she had saved and refrained from consuming. She also took some threads from the bottom of her dress and used them to ignite the candles.
"My mother encouraged all the other women in the barrack to do the same, and they all followed suit. As a result, the barrack was illuminated every Friday night with these candles. She never wavered in her faith, and even after the war, she maintained her connection to her Jewish identity and observance. She insisted that she survived solely because of her Shabbat candles," Olga recounted.
The Power of Light
For many years in the 90's there was a small advertisement that ran every Friday on the bottom corner of the front page of the New York Times. It read, “Jewish Women: Shabbat candle lighting time this Friday is ____pm.” It not only served as a reminder of this eternal mitzvah, but it also expressed Jewish pride.
The advertisement ceased after the sponsor ended it, but it reappeared once.
On January 1, 2000, the NY Times ran a Millennium edition. It was a special issue that featured three front pages. One had the news from January 1, 1900. The second was the actual news of the day, January 1, 2000. And then they had a third front page, projecting future events of January 1, 2100.