In the early 1950’s, some yeshiva bochurim visited the Tchebiner Rav, ZT”L, in Yerushalayim to discuss various talmudic concepts. At one point in the conversation, the Rav asked the bachurim an extremely difficult question, a question to which nobody had the answer to.
After some time, a bachur in the back gave an incredible answer which greatly surprised the Rav. This bachur was none other than Rav Moshe Sternbuch, Shlita.
The Rav responded, "This is not your own answer.” The Rav continued, “Your answer is so good and so extraordinary that it is not possible that at your age you could have thought of it on your own. This answer most likely comes from your mother, from her tefillos and her tears in crying to Hashem that her son should be a talmid chacham (Torah sage).”
Rav Yitzchak Zilberstein once related about a woman who had become an observant Jew, but her husband refused to join her and he would not take on doing the Mitzvos with her. She tried, at least, to get her husband to stop smoking in the house on Shabbos, and she told him that it disturbed the atmosphere of Shabbos that she was trying to create, but her husband adamantly refused.
The Rav’s Compromise Suggestion
She went to her Rav and asked him for advice with her situation, and the Rav came up with a suggestion for a compromise, that the husband should refrain from smoking only for as long as the Shabbos candles were lit.
The husband thought that the suggestion was reasonable, and he agreed. At first the wife used standard Shabbos candles, but soon, she switched them and started using thicker candles, which burned longer. The husband, true to his word, refrained from smoking as long as the candles burned.
As the weeks went by, the woman used thicker and thicker candles until eventually she began using candles that lasted 24 hours, the entire duration of Shabbos. The husband dutifully kept to his pledge, and as a result of his wife’s Shabbos candles, he increased his own observance of Shabbos!
(Aleinu L’Shabei’ach, vol. 2, p. 537)
