Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, zt”l
Rav Yaakov Feitman shared an incredible story. Rav Chaim Kanievsky, zt”l, came home from Shul one Shabbos morning, and uncharacteristically, told a tale that had just occurred.
The head of the Chevra Kadishah related that just before Shabbos, he had arranged for the body of a Jewish woman to be exhumed from a Christian cemetery, and reburied in a Jewish grave. She had died five years before, but her body was perfectly preserved, with no signs whatsoever of decay or deterioration. Even her skin appeared as fresh as if she had just expired.
What was her extraordinary history? Ninety-five years prior, her family had traveled to the United States from Russia. Her sister passed away in childhood and she herself sustained a horrible blow to the brain, rendering her entirely incapacitated, R”L. She remained in a medical facility for seventy-three years, until she died at the age of ninety, five years ago.
Rav Chaim explained to the Chevra Kadishah head why the woman’s bones had not decomposed. “The Gemara in Shabbos (152b) derives from the Pasuk in Mishlei (14:30), that ‘envy brings rotting of the bones.’ The Gemara concludes that only those who have the bad Middah of envy experience rotting of their bones in death.”
Rav Chaim went on to analyze the situation. “This woman,” he declared, “had no one of whom to be jealous of in the United States ninety years ago. She certainly was not envious of the gentiles, with whom she had little interaction, and Jews were rare in those days. After she received her injury at age seventeen, she clearly had no feelings of jealousy, and so, she passed away never having had a moment of envy in her life. Therefore, her body experienced no decomposition at all.
In fact, we can learn from her story that for people who have never had any jealousy at all, even their flesh does not spoil.” Rav Chaim added an anecdote he had heard from his grandfather, Rav Aryeh Levin, zt”l, the Tzadik of Yerushalayim.
“In Kovna,” Rav Chaim said, “when the entire cemetery had to be exhumed due to an edict from the government, only two graves contained people who were unaffected by time and the elements. One was a great Tzadik named Rav Leib Kovner, zt”l, and the other was an ordinary soldier.
His personal story was extremely uplifting. He had been drafted into the Russian army, where all the soldiers were forced to eat nonkosher food. However, this soldier refused to eat it. The Russians therefore force-fed him the food, and this soldier choked to death,”
Rav Chaim concluded with tears in his eyes. He said that his father, the Steipler Gaon, zt”l, had told him that in Morocco, when the graves in the Jewish cemetery were also being transferred to a new location, the bodies of the Tashbeitz and the Rivash were totally intact.
That Shabbos, Rav Aharon Leib Shteinman, zt”l, was the Sandek at a Bris in Bnei Brak, and this entire story was related to him. He listened intently, but he was bothered by a problem. He inquired, “Why was this lady’s body untouched, when we often see that even the bodies of very young children decompose?”
Rav Chaim answered that children who are incapable of envy because they are too young, do not have the Zechus of avoiding Kinah. However, that girl, who was already seventeen before her accident, had such amazing Middos that she had never been jealous of anyone, and therefore, she merited that her bones and flesh did not rot!
Reprinted from the Parshas Shelach 5785 email of Rabbi Yehuda Winzelberg’s Torah U’Tefilah.
