There's a lesson in there somewhere

While not a meme per se... today's post is meant as a response to [am I really doing this???] Dov Bear's request in this post.  Specifically, it is meant to relate to #25 (and in an ironic way to #19).

A friend and neighbor of mine who is a shochet (a specially trained person who slaughters kosher animals) told me the following story.  I have no idea if these events actually happened... but this is one of those stories that if it isn't true, is really should be:

A group of about 50 ultra-religious shochdim (the plural of shochet) from all over the world were flown to Argentina to spend a couple of weeks slaughtering a large order of animals which were to be put into frozen storage for use by the community over the course of several months.

They arrived, checked into their hotel, and each day of their stay they followed the same itinerary:

• Left their hotel early in the morning to take chartered buses to the slaughterhouse.
• Spent the day slaughtering and checking the animals and placing the kosher meat into a locked freezer storage unit.
• Took the chartered buses back to the hotel in the evening.

The last day of their work followed the same itinerary except that instead of returning to the hotel for the night, the chartered buses were only scheduled to stop at the hotel to pick up their luggage and then take them to the airport for their flights back to their various countries.

When the men were passing the gates to the slaughterhouse for the last time the security guard refused to let them board their buses, insisting that someone was missing.  A quick count revealed that one of them was, in fact, unaccounted for.

A search of the slaughterhouse turned up no sign of the man and the group's leader was about to call the police when someone suggested they look in the locked freezer unit where all of the kosher meat they had slaughtered had been put. 

Sure enough, the missing man was found there... extremely cold, but otherwise unhurt.  However, if he had been left in there until the first shipment of meat was scheduled to be picked up, he would certainly have been long dead.

When the group's leader asked the security guard how he had realized that someone was missing, since with their long beards and almost identical clothes they probably looked alike to the non-Jew, the guard answered "the missing man was the only one of your group who ever said 'hello' and 'good-bye' to me".

I'm pretty sure there's a lesson in there somewhere.