By Rabbi Yisaschar Frand
Vilna Gaon
During the time of the Vilna Gaon, a young couple had gotten married, and shortly afterward, the husband vanished without a trace. The poor wife was left an agunah, a living widow unable to remarry because her husband might still be alive. Thirty years passed, and then, one fine day, a man appeared on her doorstep and declared that he was her long-lost husband and told her a long story about what had kept him from returning for so many years.
The woman looked at the man and did not recognize him as her husband. The man was about the same build and coloring as her husband, but he did not seem familiar and she expressed her reservations to him. “Test me,” he said. “Ask me any question about our life together. See if I know the answers.”
So, she asked him questions, and he had all the answers but she remained suspicious, and it was decided to seek the advice of the Vilna Gaon.
“Take the man to the shul,” said the Gaon. “Ask him to point out his makom kavua, the place where he normally sat.”
They took him to the shul and asked him to point to his seat. The man hemmed and hawed, but he could not do it. Then he broke down and admitted that he had learned all his information from the husband whom he had befriended many years earlier.
The Vilna Gaon had put his finger on the flaw in this man’s diabolical plan. Assuming that the man was an impostor seeking to move in with another man’s wife, he was obviously far from a righteous person. Such a person would seek out all sorts of important details to “prove” his identity, but it would not occur to him to find out about the husband’s seat in shul or any of the other holy matters in Jewish life.
Reprinted from the Parshas Vayigash 5785 edition of At the ArtScroll Table.
