A yeshivah in Israel once rented a bus to take the students on an excursion. Whoever wanted a seat on the bus had to pay in advance and was given a ticket with his seat number on it. On the day of the trip, Binyamin* boarded the bus and found someone else sitting in his seat, the one he had paid for. This other student had not paid for a seat at all.
Binyamin headed toward the person in charge to ask him to remove the boy from his seat. One of the rabbis saw what was happening.
“Vatranus,” he instructed, “giving in on your rights, is a very virtuous middah.”
The boy said, “But Rabbi, I paid, and he didn’t.”
The rabbi replied, “Vatranus is not when you are 99 percent right and the other party is 1 percent right; it’s when you are 100 percent right and you still give in.”
Although we hear many stories about the great segulah of vatranus, it’s never enough. We always need chizuk in this area, because it’s so hard to give in — especially in the heat of the moment. R’ Bergman* told me there were two boys in his yeshivah who constantly argued with each other. It bothered him a great deal, and it was having a negative effect on the rest of the yeshivah.
One day, he called a meeting with these boys and taught them the unbelievable segulah of giving in and making peace. “Give in to each other and make shalom and then you can ask Hashem for whatever you want.”
The boys were moved by the rabbi’s plea, and they agreed to make peace. About five weeks later, one of the boys came back to the rabbi to thank him. “Hashem answered the tefillah I made that day,” he said. “I asked Hashem to bring my unmarried thirty-year-old brother his shidduch. The very next day the shidduch was suggested and now, five weeks later, we are about to celebrate the engagement!”
The following year, R’ Bergman made a bris milah for his first (and, as it turned out, only) son in the yeshivah. The second of the formerly squabbling boys came to him at the bris milah and said, “Hashem answered my tefillah.”
He explained: “R’ Bergman had four girls and expressed his desire to have a boy. I prayed to Hashem that day for the rabbi to have a boy and, baruch Hashem, here we are celebrating the bris milah.”
The power of vatranus is amazing. R’ Elimelech Biderman told a story about one of his own talmidim, which took place not long ago. The man and his wife rented a hall for a sheva berachos they were hosting on Leil Shabbos. They came on Friday to set up and saw that the venue was already prepared for a different sheva berachos.
