Chofetz Chaim Heritage Foundation
Parents work all their lives to support their families. If they manage to amass some wealth, they hope that it will someday be divided among their children. It will make their lives easier and be a lasting reminder of their parents’ love and care. That’s the hope. However, all too often, an inheritance turns from a boon into a battle. With a sum of money dangling before their eyes, the siblings begin to think about the problems that money would solve, the opportunities it might open, the goodies it could buy. They count up their share before it’s even distributed. But if another sibling has a different idea about who gets what, a formerly loving family can quickly disintegrate into warring factions.
That’s the usual path of inheritance machlokes. Each person carefully calculates what should be his and self-righteously defends it. Rav Aharon Leib Shteinman bemoaned the fact that many such cases came before him. He often advised people that even if according to halachah they had the right to what they were demanding, they would never lose by being mevater.
He pointed to Rav Chaim Kanievsky as a perfect example of this approach. Rav Chaim was an only son who was entitled to the entire inheritance, and yet he left some of his father’s property to his sister. “Do you think he lost anything as a result?” Rav Shteinman asked. “No. He only gained from it.”
Rav Chaim once explained his decision to share the inheritance with his sister: “I took what I needed and left the rest to my sister. I have nowhere to keep it.” He said that he gave his sister the rights to sell their father’s sefer, Kehillos Yaakov, because he had his own sefarim to sell. Also, he felt she deserved the profits from the sefarim because their father lived with her for many years. None of these issues would have interfered with Rav Chaim's right to take the entire inheritance if he had wanted to do so. But he knew that by making his sister’s welfare his business, he could only prosper.
Adapted from an article in Yated Neeman
