When he was still a young man living in his father’s home, Rav Yitzchok used to fast and afflict himself, depriving himself of sleep and thus hoping to better serve Hashem. He would secretly give his daily fare to the servants and he fasted until nightfall. He did this for one entire year. That year, on Yom Kippur night, as he stood before his father, Rav Yechiel Michel of Zlotchov, he was so overcome with fatigue that he fell asleep standing and had a vision. In that vision he wandered the heavenly palaces from chamber to chamber and there he saw that his avoda and his lack of sleep, his deprivation and fasting had an unwholesome stench, whereas when he observed his father’s beautiful chamber and his father’s avoda, all the sleep his father slept and the food he ate and drinks he drank, Rav Yechiel Michel smelled like fragrant flowers and glowed and shone with splendor.
When he awoke from his vision, his father, the Tzaddik Rav Yechiel Michel of Zlotchov, turned to him and said, “So whose way of serving Hashem is better – mine or yours? My eating and sleeping or your fasting and afflictions?”
(Kisvei Kodesh Rav Moshe Midner)
