Buttons

Ask members of any beis din how they would describe a case of children battling over a yerushah, and they will probably say disturbing, frustrating, and perhaps even extremely painful. After five long years, I just concluded such a case and it left me totally exhausted — physically and emotionally. (This is being written with their permission.)

The case didn’t involve a lot of money, real estate, properties, or stocks. It was just about “things.” Plain and simple, things. It started five years ago with a little bickering, arguing, and complaining, and morphed into one of those drop-dead family civil wars, in which the words compromise and empathy just did not exist.

And it was all over things. I wanted to title my article “Things,” but after remembering a story I heard many years ago about Rav Elchonon Wasserman Hy”d, I chose to title the article “Buttons.”

When Rav Elchonon came to the United States in the 1930s to raise funds for his Baranovich yeshivah, he was having a difficult time. Someone suggested he go visit an old childhood friend of his who had arrived some years earlier on these shores and had become very successful in the garment industry. They warned him, however, that his old friend no longer lived the life of a shomer Torah u’mitzvos.