Wisdom & Wit

Wisdom & Wit for Pesach

A woman came to a certain Rav in Yerushalayim and asked him to tell her the location of the gravesite of his father, as she wanted to go there and say Tehillim. She explained her request:

As was customary in Europe, when a stranger arrived in a town, he would leave his money with the local Rav and ask him to look after it. Once, a man came to your father, the Rav of the town, and left a considerable sum of money with him. As he always did in such cases, the Rav placed the money in an envelope. However, as some communal emergency arose just at that time, instead of placing the envelope in a drawer designated just for this purpose, the Rav absentmindedly used the envelope to mark the place in the sefer he was learning at the time. He then replaced the sefer in his bookshelf, totally forgetting about the envelope.

When the person who had brought the money for safekeeping came to the Rav and asked for his money back, the Rav searched and searched, but couldn’t find the envelope. Finally, he asked the man to come back in few days. During that time, the Rav borrowed enough money to repay the man who had deposited the envelope with him.

While the Rav said nothing to anyone about what had transpired, he was afraid that the envelope might have been stolen by the maid, and he decided not to leave anything valuable around in the future.

When the time came for Pesach cleaning, the Rav took out each volume of his sefarim, and it was then that he found the envelope. He reconstructed what had happened.

With tears in his eyes, he called for the maid and told her the whole story, begging her to forgive him for having suspected her. He told her that she should take anything in the house as a gift, as a sign of her forgiveness.

“Rebbe, I need no material possessions,” said the woman. “There is one thing I would ask of you, though. My husband and I have been married for many years, and we are childless. Give me a blessing that I may conceive.”

“Many years later, the Rav moved to Eretz Yisrael, where he lived the rest of his days. And I,” concluded the woman who had come to the Rav for help in finding the grave of his father, “am the daughter of that maid. I was born a year after that incident occurred.”

~~~

At the Pesach Seder of the Tzemach Tzedek, after the middle matza had been broken, one of the guests tried to measure the two pieces, so as to see which was the bigger one, to be used for the afikoman. Seeing this, the Tzemach Tzedek exclaimed, “If one has to measure to know which of the two is the larger piece, the other one is the larger.”

Shmuel Himelstein’s Words of Wisdom, Words of Wit; A Touch of Wisdom, A Touch of Wit; and “Wisdom and Wit” available at your local Jewish bookstore

• Other Wisdom & Wit
• Wisdom and Wit
• Wisdom and Wit
• Wisdom and Wit