Some prayers take thirty years to get answered. Not because God is slow. Because the answer has to move through zoning boards, lawsuits, and township votes first. A rabbi and his wife in New Jersey just found that out the hard way, and the hard way finally worked.
This fall, Millburn Township agreed to pay Rabbi Mendel and Rivkah Bogomilsky three million dollars and clear the last obstacle to the synagogue they’d been trying to build since 1994, according to Jewish Link’s reporting on the settlement. You don’t need to be Jewish, or religious at all, to feel the shape of that story. You just need to have waited a long time for something you were told, again and again, wasn’t quite allowed yet.
What actually happened in Millburn this fall
The township’s planning board voted. The vote was unanimous. It approved a two-story building called the Chai Chabad Center, with a finished basement, a sanctuary, and classrooms, sitting on 3.4 acres at a corner lot near the Bogomilskys’ own home…