Today. It was six in the morning this Sunday, Av 26, 5786. From the street came the piercing cries of a man desperately needing help. The author of these lines was alarmed and confused. Looking at the street in its entirety, he saw no one. Only with difficulty did he realize that the cries were coming from the deep garbage pit that had been built there in recent months by the municipality to replace the old bins.

It was there that a man in his twenties lay, thin and gaunt, his eyes fixed deep in their sockets, his face full of pain and despair, fighting for his life, powerless to climb the walls of the hole into which he had fallen. Only a miracle saved him. His hands and arms, wet with sweat, almost made the rescue impossible. Only with great difficulty did he return to the surface, where he remained groping and kissing the pavement of the street as if it were his greatest passion. For endless minutes he had been certain he was going to die, eaten by rats.

He kept asking for "water, water," he was about to faint, as if he had suffered a serious traumatic accident. He couldn't say anything more after the terror he had experienced inside that sinister hole. He only calmed down after half an hour, after drinking and eating the little that the author of these lines had meanwhile gone to get from the house. His name was Miguel. He was destitute and with great sadness in his heart. His mother had died months before, his father was in prison for some crime. A divine baby that a beautiful couple had once been proud of almost died in a garbage dump.

Miguel was lucky that an ordinary citizen was awake reading at that hour. It was the study of the Zohar – and with not exactly peaceful intentions – that allowed that man to be pulled from a hole in the ground. Surely he is now reflecting on what happened to him this morning. He swears he doesn't do drugs and never has. It's possible he's telling the truth, but only a chaotic life immersed in delinquency can explain how he fell into that hole.

In Portugal, thefts of stored plastic bottle caps target large collections gathered for Operação Tampinhas or similar charity drives. Thieves steal these bulk quantities because recycling processors purchase them by weight to fund medical therapies and equipment for children or disabled individuals, making stockpiled caps an easy target for illicit resale.

The case described above may seem extreme, but modern life is more or less like that, populated by individual dramas, broken families, betrayals, and lives totally useless to society. Citizens tend more and more not to create, not to build anything, not to have any high interest. Few are those who honor or care to honor the partners of Creation.

God, the father, and the mother are the three partners in the creation of a child (Tractate Niddah 31a and Kiddushin 30b). Because parents are God's physical partners in bringing a person into existence, honoring one's parents is directly equated with honoring God Himself. This is why the commandment to honor parents sits on the same tablet of the Ten Commandments as duties toward God who in turn contributed the spiritual elements of ruach.

Miguel cried desperately saying that nocturnal individuals and even ladies had already looked into the depths of the hole, indifferent to his appeals and each following their own path without caring about that human life. There are no words sufficiently significant to describe a society so heartless and with such a large number of parasites.

Perhaps the author of these lines will never see the man he once helped climb out of the hole, but will receive many blessings because of him. That is how the Universe works. May the meager sum he gave him multiply many times over to enrich the world as a whole. The triumvirate that once gave life to Miguel asks him to win.