The following vignettes are about our gedolei Yisrael of the past generation and what they went through – without complaint – to achieve their greatness.
Horav Aharon Leib Shteinman, zl, was a young bochur learning in Switzerland after the war, living in extreme poverty. His room was unheated during the freezing European winters. To keep warm, he had only a thin blanket – so thin that, when snow would fall through the cracks of the roof and land on his bed, he would be covered in snow.
However, he refused to leave, saying, “If I move to a warmer place, I might lose the hasmadah, diligence, I have here.”
He would rather shiver through the night than lose his geshmak in learning. Years later, when he was already a revered lead of the generation, he once remarked to a talmid: “The warmth that a person feels in Torah never comes from the blanket – it comes from the fire inside.”
When Horav Shmuel Rozovsky, zl, was a bochur in Europe, he was so poor that he couldn’t afford bread. He would live on scraps of food given to him by kindhearted neighbors. Yet, he once said that those were the happiest days of his life.
“I was hungry,” he said, “but I was filled with Torah. And that hunger made every word of Torah taste sweeter.”
He used to say that the letters of the Gemarra became engraved on his heart during those days of hardship. Horav Chaim Kanievsky’s life was a constant expression of sacrifice of Torah, but one small story captures it best.
A relative once entered his home and found him eating a small piece of bread with sardines – standing up. When asked why he didn’t sit down to eat properly, Rav Chaim replied simply: “If I sit, it takes longer.”
Even the extra seconds of sitting were too precious to waste when they could be used for Torah. Every moment, every breath, was sacrificed to learning.
Reprinted from the Parshas Beshalach 5786 email of Peninim on the Torah prepared and edited by Rabbi L. Scheinbaum of Hebrew Academy of Cleveland.
