Rabbi Yaakov Zaks had an esrog business for many years. At one point, his business suffered a major setback — a setback that led to his having a heart attack. Hatzolah arrived and got to work, but nothing helped. Meanwhile, his wife called everyone she knew begging them to daven for him.
One friend went to daven at the kever of the Ribnitzer Rebbe. And then his neshamah simply drifted out of his body. “I left this world,” Reb Yaakov later told Shlomo Thaler, who had been close to the Ribnitzer, “and as I was rising up to Heaven I saw that my great-great-grandfather, Rav Mendele Strikover — the first admor of the Strikover dynasty — was at my side, escorting me to the next world.”
“How did you know that you were seeing Rav Mendele Strikover?” Reb Shlomo asked him. “Did you ever see a picture of him? Are there even any pictures of Rav Mendele?”
“You should know one thing,” Reb Yaakov rejoined. “In Heaven you don’t need to ask any questions. In Heaven, you just know. That’s the way it is.”
“Okay, so what happened next?”
“Rav Mendele brought me to a certain place next to a certain Yid — I didn’t know who he was, though I had an idea — and told me to wait there for the Yid to deal with me.
“I waited for what seemed like half an hour, and for some reason, I had a feeling that the Yid he had told me to wait for was the Ribnitzer Rebbe. After half an hour, the Rebbe came and asked me, ‘Yankel, what are you doing here? You’re supposed to be down on earth!’
“I remember answering him, ‘I don’t want to be down on earth. It’s not good for me there. I don’t want to return there.’
‘I promise you,’ the Ribnitzer replied, ‘that it will be good. Go back.’
“After that, Rav Mendele took me by the hand and brought me back down, where I woke up just as the Hatzolah guys began shocking my heart back to life with the defibrillator.”
Reprinted from the Parshas Chayei Sarah 5784 edition of At the ArtScroll Shabbos Table. Excerpted from the ArtScroll book – “The Ribnitzer.”
