It was the winter of 5689. The Arab wagon driver glared with obvious impatience at the group of bochurim that struggled to part from their friend. It was getting late, and the route from Chevron to Yersushalayim was steep and taxing. The skies were filled with clouds, and he wanted to set out before the rain began. “Why are they delaying? The trip is challenging enough without getting stuck in the mud that the rain will bring” – the wagon driver thought impatiently.
There was no way he could possibly comprehend the deep and loving ties between those who learn together in a the beis medrash. They didn’t know, but their hearts felt that this would be their final meeting. Who believed that the same year, the placed skies would grow stormy, and the community in Chevron would be cut down and then shut down, including the holy yeshivah that they learned in?
A few weeks earlier, Davey, the bochur Nochum Dovid Herman, had received an urgent telegram from his father, the renowned tzaddik Rav Yaakov Yosef Herman, demanding that he return home.
The telegram took Davey by complete surprise. He remembered his emotional parting from his parents four years prior. The Rosh Yeshivah, Harav Moshe Mordechai Epstein, had visited their home and advised them to send their beloved son to a place of Torah, in the new yeshivah that had been established just a year earlier in Chevron. His parents, with the fiery ahavas Torah that burned in their hearts, sent him to the yeshivah, and now, as he was thriving and learning so well, his father was requiring him to return home to America. What would be with his learning?
With the telegram in hand, Davey went over to the Rosh Yeshivah. Although he was completely surprised as well, he knew Rav Yaakov Yosef and assumed that he if he had sent such an urgent telegram, it was a sign that there was a good reason for it. In retrospect, this assumption turned out to be true. “You have to listen to your father,” the Rosh Yeshivah ruled, and Davey accepted the psak unquestioningly.
Now it was time to leave. During those poignant, sorrowful moments, Davey parted from his beloved friends, and boarded the creaky wagon, that began to wend its way in the winding paths of the Judean Hills to Yerushalayim. When they arrived, Davey first went to take leave of his grandparents, who lived in the Givat Shaul neighborhood, and after an emotional parting, he went to the train station.
Late at night, he heard the whistle and the train pulled into the platform. Davey hurried to find a comfortable seat for the long ride from Yerushalayim to Port Said in Egypt, where the ship that would take him home to America was docked.
The trip passed slowly. The train crossed the Sinai Desert, and finally, finally arrived in Port Said the next afternoon. Davey got off the train and hurried towards the port. But there, he was astonished to face the grim reality. The clerk sitting at the port informed him laconically that the ship he wanted to board had already departed.
Alone and helpless, Davey stood in the foreign port for an emotional Minchah. He had no idea how he would get out of this difficult situation, and what he should do now. But first, he davened from the depths of his heart that Hashem should extricate him from the trouble.
When he finished davening, he noticed a group of Chinese porters quickly loading cargo onto a large ship. On the spur of the moment, he went over the captain and asked where his ship was sailing to.
“Paris!” he replied in broken English, and Davey asked, “Can I join, for pay of course?”
“Of course,” the captain replied. “But this is a cargo ship, and it’s nothing like a passenger ship.” Davey didn’t have too many other options. He boarded the ship with the assumption that it would be easier to find a ship crossing the Atlantic from Paris.
As the only Jew among hundreds of Chinese people, Davey attracted a lot of attention. They stared at him when he took his black boxes with long straps out of his velvet sack, and put them on his arm and forehead, and stood in the corner of the ship to daven.
They couldn’t really communicate much, but they were able to understand that these were special tools through which he could connect with the Creator in Heaven and ask for whatever he wanted.
On Erev Shabbos in the afternoon, Davey was busy preparing for Shabbos when the ship got caught in a sudden storm. He was thrown to the wooden floor. Before he could even get up, the door to his room burst open. The captain stood there with a group of burly sailors. With alarm on his face, he cried to Davey: “Quick, take your black boxes and get on deck. We’re going to sink!”
Davey couldn’t find his balance, but the sailors didn’t wait. They gripped him by the arms and legs and ran with him to the deck, which was flooding with water and rolling in the waves like a walnut shell.
They stood him up at the edge of the deck and then moved off with awe. Everyone gazed at Davey who could barely wrap the tefillin around his arm and place it correctly on his forehead. He began to cry from the depths of his heart: “Ribbonon shel Olam, You commanded us to observe Shabbos, which is coming soon, as a day of rest, please with Your mercy, command the stormy sea to rest from its fury.”
He had no idea where he had mustered up the courage to utter such a tefillah, but suddenly, the sea began to calm, and the captain and sailors befell him with hugs and cheering, in gratitude.
In the days that remained of the voyage, Davey was accorded every honor. He was moved from his little room to be near the captain, and was called ‘the holy one’ by everyone on the ship.
Davey continued his long journey home, and a few months after he arrived in New York, back to his family, the terrible massacre was unleashed by Arabs on the Jews of Chevron and the yeshivah students. Now everyone understood the meaning of the urgent telegram that Rav Yaaov Yosef had sent his son, summoning him home quickly.
Maasei Emunim
A Story About Amen and Tefillah
Rav Moshe Mordechai Epstein, Rosh Yeshivas Chevron
