An elderly woman from Europe once approached the grandchildren of Rav Avraham Shag, ZT”L, asking to be taken to his kever on Har HaZeisim. Puzzled, the grandchildren asked her how she knew their grandfather. She responded with the following story:
“Many years ago, your grandfather was learning as usual, very immersed in his sefer, and somebody stopped by asking if he could leave a rather large sum of money with him to watch for a couple of days. The Rav said, “Yes.” However, since he was so immersed in his learning, he buried the envelope in one of his drawers and must have forgotten where he put it.
A few days later, the man returned asking for the money. Rav Shag looked and looked, but to no avail. Having lost the money, he felt awful and told the man to come back in a few days. Wondering what could’ve happened to it, he realized that nobody else had access to the room except for the maid who came in to clean. He thought that the culprit was most likely her. “But...” he thought, “how can I accuse a fellow Jew? No, I cannot do it!” Rav Shag then decided that he was going to take a loan and repay it little by little so the man could receive his money back on time. Since it was an enormous sum, he spent multiple years repaying it.
To his surprise, during Pesach cleaning, years after it was repaid, he was going through his drawer and found the long-lost envelope. Right away, he reached for the phone and called up the former maid. He told her, “I want to apologize to you. I thought negatively about you. I thought you took the envelope," he said.
She responded, “Please, Rav... you went out of your way to borrow a lot of money and spent years stretching yourself financially to repay it just not to cause me shame. You don't need my forgiveness.”
“No! No!” he said, “I shouldn’t have blamed you in my mind; it could’ve destroyed your entire career had I said something about it.”
She responded, “Ok, I’ll forgive you. But...on one condition. I’m an older woman already and have not yet merited to have children. If you bless me to have a child, I’ll forgive you.”
Happily, the Rav blessed her, and they both parted ways. The old woman then looked her grandchildren in their eyes and said, “I am that child.”
