“You must hear what happened to Reb Shmuel shlit”a,” a friend told me. After I heard his story, I decided to share it.
Reb Shmuel shlit”a is one of the talmidei chachamim in Yeshivas Mir. On this particular day, he was davening Maariv at 9 p.m. He was in middle of the section before Krias Shema, when he suddenly recalled something very important. Just that morning, he had come to kollel in the Mir with an envelope containing 3,000 shekels. He recalled having later placed the envelope on the bench in the beis medrash, but he could not remember taking it back from there.
Reb Shmuel hurried to push the thought out of his mind. He was davening, and there was no point in harping on it. After davening, he searched his pockets and discovered that his suspicions were well founded. Apparently, he had left the envelope on the bench at the end of seder, two hours earlier, at 7 p.m. It was quite likely that the non-Jewish cleaning man had already taken care of the room, and of the envelope as well. What could he do in order to at least attempt to salvage the money?
There are cameras that film everything in the Mir beis midrash, he thought to himself, so if the non-Jewish cleaner took the money for himself, I still have hope. He would go and see if the envelope was still there, even if it was empty, and with Hashem’s help, through the cameras, they would discover where the money had gone as well.
Rav Shmuel went to the yeshivah, searched for the envelope in the beis medrash, and did not find it – not on the bench and not on the floor. He asked Hashem to help him think of an idea for what to do next.
It entered his mind that the envelope had certainly been thrown into the garbage.
He went over to the trash can, but it was empty.
He went to the large dumpster belonging to the yeshivah, hoping to recognize the bag that had recently been thrown into it. Here he really needed rachamei Shamayim, since the dumpster belonging to the Mir yeshivah has a unique electronic mechanism: Every couple of hours, there is an automatic lever that presses down all the garbage inside the dumpster in order to make room for the next bags.
The chances of his finding the right garbage bag were very slim, but he strengthened his emunah in Hakadosh Baruch Hu, Who would safeguard the envelope for him even under such conditions. He went over to the dumpster and discovered that it was still full. In the last two hours, the lever hadn’t worked! He recognized the garbage bag from the room where his kollel learned, took it out, and found, to his surprise, not only the envelope but also the money. The envelope had been thrown out with all its contents, down to the last shekel!
“Do you understand?” my friend said. “Look how Reb Shmuel did not lose his emunah at any stage, and he anticipated a yeshuah the entire time. He went
