Rav Gad Eisner was a well-known and pious Gerrer chassid who endured excruciating suffering through the war years. Nonetheless, he became one of the greatest mashpi’im in Ger, infusing emunah and bitachon into yeshivah bachurim with much vigor and dynamism.
Once, when talking to mechanchim about his war experiences, he related the following anecdote:
“I recall trudging together with a group of my friends on one of the infamous death marches. After a few days of walking, I simply could not continue and felt my body giving way to all the torture and exhaustion it had endured. I realized that this was it; my time had come.
“I lay down on the road surface and began reciting my last prayers, knowing that even if I didn’t pass out on my own, I would be shot by one of the German guards.
Suddenly, I heard one of my friends tenderly call out to me, “Gade’le! Get up and loif, get up and run! You can do it!” And I did. And here I am to tell the tale.
“I want to tell you something,” Rav Gad continued telling the group of mechanchim. “You know what gave me the strength and courage to stand up again? Not what he told me to do and not why he told me to do it...but how he told me!
“He didn’t say, ‘Gad, stand up.’ He said, ‘Gade’le, stand up!’ He used the name that my beloved parents had affectionately called me when I was a young boy. It was that one extra syllable that he added to my name – not even consciously – that stirred in me a voice of the past, a voice of courage, which enabled me to somehow, somewhere, find the strength I didn’t have to get up and try again.”
One letter isn’t just simply a letter. Sometimes it can be life itself. Literally
Reprinted from the Parshas Shoftim 5783 edition of At the ArtScroll Shabbos Table. Excerpted from the ArtScroll book “Pirkei Avos: Generation to Generation” by Rabbi Nosson Muller.
