The Midrash tells us (Bereishis Rabbah 28:10) that since the creation of the world, Hashem has been involved with making shidduchim. This does not merely mean that when it is time for a couple to marry, Hashem brings them together. Rather, beginning decades earlier, Hashem leads each person to the circumstances they need to be in to eventually find and marry their zivug.
Rav Yitzchak Scheiner, the late rosh yeshivah of the Kaminetz Yeshivah in Yerushalayim, grew up in Pittsburgh at a time when there were no yeshivos or talmud Torahs in the vicinity. His parents were religious, but having no other choice they sent him to public school. After eight years of elementary school, he went on to a public high school called Peabody High. After graduating from there, he was accepted to the University of Pittsburgh, where he planned to major in mathematics. He was very good at math and Latin and his teachers told him he would become a scholar in those subjects.
As can be seen in hindsight, one potential hindrance to this plan was that forty days before his future wife was born, a Heavenly voice rang out, saying: “Esther Leah bas Rav Moshe (the granddaughter of the famed rosh yeshivah Rav Baruch Ber Leibowitz), is going to marry Yitzchak Aryeh ben Reb Dov.”
Growing Up in Pittsburgh – a Torah Learning Wilderness
At that time, Rav Scheiner was a three-year-old boy growing up in Pittsburgh with no Torah learning available, while his wife was born in the great Torah center of Vilna. Yitzchak Aryeh would not know much about Gemara for the first sixteen years of his life, but he was destined to marry a girl from the family of the gadol hador, the author of the Bircas Shmuel, a sefer used in every yeshivah in the world. Not to mention that they lived almost 6,000 miles from each other.
How did Hashem arrange such a marriage? The summer after Rav Scheiner graduated from high school, Rav Avraham Bender went to Pittsburgh to solicit funds for a yeshivah. He had never visited the East End neighborhood where the Scheiners lived, but on this occasion, Hashem sent him there. Since the Scheiner family was one of the few that kept kosher, Rav Bender stayed at their house.
While making small talk one day, he discovered that young Yitzchak was planning to attend the University of Pittsburgh. “Why aren’t you sending your son to New York to learn in yeshivah?” he asked the boy’s parents, who did not know that there were yeshivos at that time in New York. They agreed to send him there, and he went.
Meeting New People who Encouraged Him to Attend Torah Vodaas
The following summer, Yitzchak learned in a camp in the Catskill mountains called Camp Mesivta, the only Orthodox Jewish learning camp that existed at the time. (He had developed a bad cough and it was recommended that he go there to breathe the fresh mountain air.) It was there that he met new people who ended up bringing him to Yeshiva Torah Vodaas, where he studied for years under the great rosh yeshivah Rav Shlomo Heiman, and then under Rav Reuven Grozovsky.
Rav Grozovsky had married the daughter of Rav Baruch Ber Leibowitz and lived in Vilna. Later, he moved with his father-in-law to Kaminetz and learned in the yeshivah there called Knesses Beis Yitzchak. During World War II, Rav Grozovsky escaped Europe and eventually found his way to New York and Yeshiva Torah Vodaas. There, he suggested his niece, a granddaughter of Rav Baruch Ber Leibowitz, as a shidduch for his student, Rav Yitzchak Scheiner.
That is the amazing story of how Rav Yitzchak Scheiner and his rebbetzin came together! These are merely some details of how Hashem made one shidduch. The same is true in millions of other people’s lives. Hashem is the mezaveig zivugim. He matches up people from different backgrounds, from different parts of the world, after years and years of advance planning.
Reprinted from the Parshas Eikev 5782 edition of At the ArtScroll Shabbos Table. Excerpted from the ArtScroll book “Living Emunah on Shidduchim” by Rabbi David Ashear.
