The following is a wonderful story from the "hooks of the pillars" from the wonderful words of Rabbi Yitzchak Silberstein shlit"a, brought by Rabbi Michael Zoran, and it teaches us that when we asked a rabbi about a certain matter, how much we should not be clever about it.
Dr. Moshe Elyakim Brokem, who serves in the afternoon hours as a senior physician at Maayan HaYeshua, and in the afternoon is one of the most important students at the Beit David Kollel in Holon, said. In the synagogue where I prayed a few years ago, there was a Jew whose origin was from Ara B." He made a living as a Judaica merchant, he would travel twice a year to the United States with a catalog of Judaica products, books, Pentateuch, parokhet, and the like, and he would receive orders, and then he would send them from Israel to abroad. On Chol Hamoed Pesach, the same merchant told him that he was going to go abroad immediately after Pesach, and I said to him, "You are entering into a great halakhic question, you may leave here on the night of Pesach, but you will get there on the morning of the second day of Yom Kippur, and the halacha is that as soon as you get there, you are obligated to observe the second Yom Tov." "So what do you offer me?", the merchant asked, "I said to him: "The simplest thing is to change the card, and postpone it to another day." But he objected: "It's out of the question, the next flight will leave only two days later, and I'll lose two days of work, it's out of the question." He added, "From what I understand from you, the prohibition is because 'you shall not gather,' meaning that I am from Eretz Yisrael and I am not obligated on the second day of Yom Kippur, and the prohibition to do labor there is so that people will not see me passing, I will try to make sure that when I travel from the airport to the hotel, no one will see me, and everything will fall into place safely." I said to him, the halacha is explicit in the Mishna Berura that even in Sana'a it is forbidden, and remember what is written in the Gemara (Shabbat 66b): Rav Yehuda said, Rav said: Wherever the Sages forbade appearance, even in private rooms, it is forbidden! He said to me, "Gut mo'ed," and he left, meaning that you are too stringent, it does not seem that something that is forbidden because of appearance, is also forbidden in private rooms, who can see me?
After seven weeks, he returned from abroad, and said to me, "I am sorry for the moment I did not listen to your voice, I paid a very high price for not listening to you, according to the pure halacha, that it is forbidden to desecrate the second day of Yom Kippur even in Sana'a." He said: "As you know, I decided that in Sana'a it is permissible to desecrate Yom Tov, and indeed I went to Los Angeles on the eve of Passover, I arrived there on the last day of Passover, I ordered a taxi and drove to the hotel, the hotel has forty-five floors, I got a room on the thirty-seventh floor, of course I took the elevator, because in my opinion in Sana'a it is allowed." "After settling into the hotel, I decided that since I had to start my work immediately at the end of the holiday, I would now shave, and I would be ready to go as soon as the holiday ended. I thought to myself, a hotel that doesn't have a single Jew in it, what problem can there be here to shave, who can see me in a closed room, on the thirty-seventh floor, there are a thousand rooms here that are all occupied by non-Jews, I am not forbidden to do work on Yom Kippur, only according to the doctor's opinion it is forbidden for the sake of appearance, who can see what I am doing inside my room?!" "I took out the shaver, I put it in the electrical outlet, but I forgot to set it to the US watt, in Israel the watt is 220, and abroad it is 110, as soon as I put the machine in the socket, the machine started to blow smoke, although nothing happened, I immediately took the machine out of the socket, and apart from a small damage to the machine, nothing happened. After a few seconds, Y calls me from the reception downstairs, and asks me, What happened in the room, the smoke detector beeps, I told them the story of the machine and they calmed down." "Now I had a problem, the whole room is full of smoke, you can't open windows on the higher floors of the hotel, everything works there with air conditioning, and all my rooms are full of smoke. I decided to open the door, so that the smoke would come out, what I didn't know, that the smoke detector of the corridor was not connected to the reception, but directly to the Los Angeles Fire Department, another thing I didn't know, that about three weeks ago there was a big fire in a hotel in Los Angeles and two people were burned to death, and they blamed the fire department, for not coming on time, and all the media there was against them, Until, under pressure from the public, they set up a commission of inquiry to investigate exactly what happened.
As soon as the detector beeped at the fire department, thirty trucks and three hundred firefighters were called! I, who had already closed the door, heard what was happening downstairs in the hotel, and by the time I thought about going to the window and seeing what had happened, dozens of firefighters had already rushed to my room, and with the blow of an axe broke through the room, shouting loudly: "Where is the fire?" I was very frightened, of the unplanned break-in, I explained what happened with the machine, they responded with understanding and warned me: "Next time be careful, when you put a machine in an outlet." But in the meantime, along with the firefighters, the media photographers also came in, and they filmed him sitting with a machine in my hand and wanting to shave, and all the news broadcasts in Los Angeles opened with the dramatic story of hundreds of firefighters rushing to the hotel and the mistake that occurred, And the picture of me with the machine in my hand and a kippah on my head was on the top of every billboard. The Jews of Los Angeles who opened the news on the night of Yom Kippur saw me sitting in a very unpleasant position, and they also saw me, sitting with a kippah on my head, and a razor in my hand. Everywhere I went, Jews stopped me and asked, "Is it you who wanted to desecrate the second U-T and set fire to a hotel?" and instead of doing business, I did terrible humiliation to myself. I felt in my flesh the words of the Sages: "They did it in secret. And the Holy One, blessed be He, made them public."
