The Chofetz Chaim was surely a scholar’s scholar. More than this, however, he was also a genuine folk-hero. Scholars respected him, but the common people loved him with a rare passion. The reasons are many and no doubt complex. But the most compelling one is simply that he considered himself as one with them and their problems. Even his books, despite the great scholarship they represent, were written to be used by ordinary men – and in many instances, by ordinary women, too. Sensing that he identified with them, people did not hesitate to seek his advice and assistance.
Although he never accepted the position of rabbi in Radin, he was in fact its spiritual and temporal leader. When some townspeople unfairly criticized and embarrassed their rabbi for the deficiencies of the town’s mikvah, it was the Chofetz Chaim who guaranteed the funding and supervised the building of a new one. When Radin was devastated by fires that, in successive years, destroyed first one half and then the other half of the Jewish section, it was he who organized emergency relief, fund-raising, and the rebuilding of the town.
A poor workingman was not ashamed to ask him, as author of Ahavas Chessed, how a laborer living hand-to-mouth could be expected to perform the mitzvah of lending money to others. And he did not feel patronized when he was told to save a few pennies a week, eventually building it up to a fund of several rubles, for loaning to fellow workers short of pocket money. That was down-to-earth advice that was followed by thousands, and it was typical of the pragmatic idealism of a man who never took a penny offered to him by people who had the notion that his greatness entitled him to gifts.
The Chofetz Chaim’s awesome care in maintaining the strictest possible standards in his financial dealings has become legendary. No doubt many of the stories attributed to him are apocryphal – but, for most of them, there is more than ample first-hand testimony ... He insisted that his son reprint hundreds of sections of Mishnah Berurah to replace originals where pages had inadvertently been put in the wrong order. ... The Chofetz Chaim himself once went dashing through the Jewish quarter of Warsaw shortly before Shabbos seeking to pay printers who had left work early without getting their pay for the week ... When a non-Jewish railroad employee put parcels of his books on board a train for free delivery, the Chofetz Chaim tore up an amount of postage stamps sufficient to defray the loss of revenue to the government ... In his first speaking tour on behalf of the book Chofetz Chaim, he accepted orders, but not deposits, because of the possibility that he might not be able to make delivery to some pre-paying customers, thus becoming guilty of improperly taking their money ... The stories are legion.
