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)
Reprinted from the Parshas Acharei Mos 5784 email of Rabbi Yehuda Winzelberg’s Torah U’Tefilah.
