A Distressed Woman Prays | No Rabbi | Beit Midrash

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Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu

קטגוריה משנית

Rav Eliyahu never for a minute forgot that at the end of the day, his main business was people - individuals. We’re talking here about his early days as a rabbinical judge, when he sat in the rabbinical court in Beer Sheva, which was then a small, remote city whose rabbinical court served all the surrounding towns. During those years there was a large population of immigrants from Morocco and Tunisia in the city.

When the Rav was coming out of the judges’ chambers, he noticed a woman in her thirties, an immigrant from Morocco, sitting with a book of Psalms in her hand. Day after day, the Rav saw her sitting and praying. When three weeks had passed, the young rabbinical judge requested that someone ask her what she was doing there.
The woman explained that she was married to a taxi driver in Morocco, and a week after the wedding, he set off on a journey to a distant city and never returned. Her investigations revealed that he had been in an accident but his body had not been found.

After the rabbinical court in Casablanca had not permitted her to remarry, due to a lack of witnesses, she decided to come to a rabbinical court in Israel and ask here for permission to remarry.

The Rav heard her story, and immediately took a taxi to visit the Baba Sali in Netivot. "My brother, the Baba Chaki, knows everyone in Morocco," the Baba Sali told him, and so the Rav traveled to Ramle in order to ask the Baba Sali’s brother if he knew the people concerned.
"There were two gravediggers in that town," the Baba Chaki told the Rav. "Both of them moved to Israel - one lives in Dimona and the other in Kiryat Gat."
And so the Rav carried on traveling, now to Dimona to order to find the first gravedigger. When he arrived at the address that had been given to him, he found a mourning notice of the entrance door, from which he learnt that the man he was searching for so hard, the man who could release the woman from her position as a wife without a husband yet who couldn’t remarry, had died right then, and the chances of the woman’s success were growing more remote.

Despite all this, the Rav entered the family home, waited for Minchah (the afternoon prayer), and between Mincha and Aravit (the evening prayer), he gave over some Torah thoughts and told the story which had brought him there. Suddenly, one of those listening got up on his feet and said, "I’m the other gravedigger from that town – I came from Kiryat Gat to pay a condolence call on my friend’s family." Right away, the Rav extracted from him a witness report that helped to free the same woman from her difficult position.
It’s true that books are full of stories of the wonders of rabbis, but this "wonder" wouldn’t have happened if the Rav hadn’t noticed that a distressed woman was sitting outside the courtroom and praying.

Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu