Sortes biblicae came up snake eyes this morning, and I’m worried.

This is not a joke.

So I was putting on my tefillin this morning, and I find a piece of someone’s tzitzis in my tefillin cover. No idea where it came from, I don’t think it’s mine, but I figure it needs to go in shaimos.

I’m not going to run around the corner to Capitol Seforim just for this, so I figure, I’ll hide it near the back of the siddur I’m davening in. Maybe in the yotzros, this is an Ashkenaz shul and they always skip them anyway. Nobody’s going to open that page, it’ll stay there until the siddur is worn beyond further use, and then it will go to shaimos together with the siddur. Makes sense, right?

So I flip open the siddur to about where I figure the yotzer for parshas parah should be. What do I find myself staring at in horror: וידוי שכיב מרע, the deathbed confession.

Five hundred pages in this siddur, and it had to open right there.

Now I’ve said that tefillah before, back in March 2020, when I was hospitalized with COVID and gasping for breath on 15 liters of oxygen. Didn’t expect to leave the hospital alive, but b’ezras Hashem I made it in the end. Sustained some heart damage though, which is now catching up with me: I had another heart attack a couple weeks ago, now having random chest pains not associated with exertion, the whole bit. (And yes, I’m under the close supervision of a cardiologist, it goes without saying.) I’ve been worried about my health, and now this happens.

It’s not like anyone in the shul would have had opportunity to say that, the binding ought to be tight there, there’s no reason for the siddur to have fallen open exactly where it did without a reason. Is Someone trying to send me a message?

I’m worried.