At the Shivah for Rav Noach Weinberg, zt”l, the Rosh Yeshivah of Aish HaTorah, Rav Noach’s daughter told over a story. Decades earlier, a certain man visited the Yeshivah for two months to learn Torah. As he was preparing to go back to America, Rav Noach approached him, and asked why he was in such a rush to return home.
The young man was reluctant to answer, not looking to give an honest reply. Finally, after enough prodding, the man shared that he was a chess champion and he had a tournament to return to.
Rav Noach thought for a moment, and then he proposed a deal. He said, “Play one game of chess with me. If you win, I will not bother you anymore about going home. But if I win, you stay in Yeshivah.”
He agreed.
After about an hour of intense playing, Rav Noach made an unexpected move and cornered him. It was a checkmate! The man was shocked. He could not believe he had lost! He was a national chess champion, and he just got defeated by a Rabbi.
Nevertheless, “A deal is a deal,” he said, and he ended up remaining in Yeshivah for some time after that. He ended up being very successful, and he later became a Rosh Yeshivah in Eretz Yisroel.
After that chess game, when Rav Noach was asked if he used to be a chess champion himself, he replied, “No. I have not played chess since I was eleven years old.”
He was then asked how he could have had the audacity to propose such a deal to the man, and he explained, “I knew that if I lost the game, this man’s connection to Hashem, and all of his future descendants’ connections to Yiddishkeit might also be lost. I also knew that Hashem wanted him to stay. I made the offer to play, and I simply trusted that Hashem would make me win!”
Reprinted from the Parshas Beshalach 5786 email of Rabbi Yehuda Winzelberg’s Torah U’Tefilah.
