About the willingness to leave your comfort zone for God's Word. By Richard Elofer

Rabbi Yaakov Dovid Wilovsky, known as Ridvaz (pronounced: Ridwaas), had a very interesting life. He was born in Lithuania in 1845 and later lived in Chicago for some time before moving to Eretz Israel immigrated and spent the rest of his life in Tzefat lived in the north of Galilee.

One day a man walked into one school (Yiddish for synagogue) in Tzefat and saw it Ridvaz Sit bowed down and cry bitterly. The man ran over to the Amberto see if he could help him. "What's wrong?" he asked worriedly. “Nothing,” he replied Ridvaz. "It's just that today is the yahrzeit (the anniversary of my father's death)."

The man was amazed. The father of Ridvaz must have died more than half a century ago. How could the Rav still cry such bitter tears over a family member who had died so long ago?

"I cried," he explained Ridvaz, “because I thought of my father’s deep love for Torah.”

The Ridvaz illustrated this love using an incident:

When I was six years old, my father hired a private teacher to study Torah with me. The lessons went well, but my father was very poor and after a while he could no longer pay the teacher.

»One day the teacher sent me home with a note. It said that my father hadn't paid anything for two months. He gave my father an ultimatum: If my father didn't come up with the money, the teacher would unfortunately no longer be able to give me lessons. My father was dismayed. He really didn't have any money for anything at the moment, and certainly not for a private tutor. But he also couldn't bear the thought of me stopping learning.

That evening in the school my father heard a rich man talking to his friend. He said he was building a new house for his son-in-law and just couldn't find bricks for the fireplace. That was all my father needed to hear. He rushed home and carefully dismantled the chimney of our house, brick by brick. Then he delivered the stones to the rich man, who paid him a lot of money for them.

Happy, my father went to the teacher and paid him the outstanding monthly salary and that for the next six months.

“I still remember that cold winter well,” he continued Ridvaz continued. »Without a fireplace we couldn't make a fire and the whole family suffered miserably from the cold.

But my father was firmly convinced that he had made a good decision from a business perspective. In the end, all the suffering was worth it if it meant I could study the Torah.«From: Shabbat Shalom Newsletter, 755, November 18, 2017, 29. Cheshvan 5778
Publisher: World Jewish Adventist Friendship Center

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