At His Rebbi’s Command

Rabbi Wolf remembers how one year after Yom Kippur, he asked the Rosh Yeshivah for a brachah, sourcing seforim that say how it’s proper to receive a brachah after Yom Kippur. An avreich, one of his close talmidim, then entered the room and Rav Shach said to him, “Refoel says that it is proper to receive a brachah on Motzaei Yom Kippur. Please give me a brachah…”

Of course, many people came to Rav Shach for brachos, making sure they did it in the right way.

“Whenever the Rosh Yeshivah was home, one could knock, and he would open the door himself,” Rabbi Wolf relates. “But if the person standing at the door asked for a brachah, Rav Shach would turn him down, saying, ‘I’m in the middle of learning now,’ or some other excuse. However, if the person came to seek daas Torah, he would answer him kindly and then add a warm brachah. There was always a pile of notes with the names of people needing a yeshuah. Rav Shach himself wrote those notes, and he would take them out and mention the names during Shemoneh Esreh.

“At the end of his life, when it was hard to take the small notes out of his pocket, he asked me to copy the names onto a big sheet of paper each day, in clear letters. Every so often, he gathered all these notes in a bag, put his hand onto it, murmured a tefillah, and then sent me with the bag to genizah.”