“From the terrible confusion that had pitilessly plagued me throughout the night, I awoke in the morning with a frightful headache. How does one get rid of a headache? An idea occurred to me and a saying of the Sages of blessed memory came to mind: ‘If he feels pain in the head, let him engage in the study of Torah.’ I began to deliberate as to whether to study first and then pray, or pray first and study afterward. And again a saying of the Sages came to me: ‘One should not stand up to pray save in a reverent frame of mind,’ and since, thank God, I was in a ‘reverent state of mind,’ I stood up and prayed. During the month of Elul, the time of self-examination and inner stock-taking, when prayer is infused with more urgency, one prays differently from ordinary days. The words of the prayers have quite a different meaning when one’s thoughts are so immersed in them. Prayer becomes true and genuine, pure prayer for its own sake, prayer that no power on earth can invalidate. I prayed joyfully and felt cleansed, uplifted - in short, like a newly created being.
“After praying, I went to the bookcase and just happened to come across a Choshen Mishpat. I opened and found a remarkable commentary by the Shakh: ‘All this I wrote on the field while running from the wars without the Kesef Mishneh in my hand to refer to.’
“Reading these remarks, I was amazed when I considered the devotion of our great scholars of yesteryear. Fleeing from Chmielnicki’s armies through empty fields where thousands of ‘those killed by the sword’ lay scattered, the holy Shakh’s brain was preoccupied with a puzzling problem in the work of Maimonides, and, as he fled, he wrote a commentary on this problem without having had the sacred book Kesef Mishneh with him. This commentary by the Shakh ignited in me an even greater desire to study, and I was reminded of Dr. Poznanski, a very poor man who looked after the suffering and requested in his will that on his headstone be inscribed the verse ‘Had Your law not been my delight, I should then have perished in my affliction.’
I went over to the bookcase, took out a Gemara and sat down to study with undivided concentration. After all my stumbling, my blundering and inner turmoil, I retreated to my own little corner, the ‘four cubits of Halachah.’ And these ‘four cubits of Halachah’ gave me something that sweetened my sorrow and led me to the highest level of joy.
Studying Torah out load intesnified my concentration. i really felt that with every additional word of Torah, I was enhancing my joy. The melody itself, the melody that accompanies the study of Torah, led me to ‘the world of complete goodness’ and I truly became ‘a free man,’ free of care, forgetting all my problems, my afflictions and my worries. It filled all my senses. The study of Torah had freed me from my mental and emotional confusion, and in me was born a kind of holy insight, a kind of ‘holy understanding,’ that led to true self-nullification before the Ein Sof, the Eternal One.
Suddenly I read in Tractate Nedarim of the Talmud: ‘ In that hour Rabbi Ishmael wept and said ‘The daughters of Israel are beautiful but poverty disfigures them.’ At that moment I thought of my sister and realized that it was almost 2:00 p.m. and she was not home yet...when they discovered that Jewish soldiers, to avoid being captured by the Nazis, were hiding in the forests around Dukla, my sister and her friend had gone to the forest to bring them some civilian clothing.”
Rabbi Pinchas Hirschprung, The Vale of Tears, pp. 81-84
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