"...and you know her husband was niftar," said my friend.
What? -- I exclaimed.
"...Oh..." said my friend.
Maybe it will not be amiss to say a few words here about R' Naftali Soloff, who was a truly remarkable person.
When I lived in Jerusalem I liked to visit the Soloffs for Shabbos and yontif, I suppose because (a) their home was overflowing with Torah; and (b) they always made me feel special.
I could end the entry here and leave those as the two take-away points for education.
But, I won't.
Every family I visited was exemplary in a hundred things but the Soloffs stood out in having carefully created (calmly, happily) an atmosphere of extraordinary yiras shamayim.
This manifested in part as extraordinary refinement.
I remember R' Soloff telling a story to his children about Mr. Right Hand and Mr. Left Hand, who got into an argument. The argument escalated, until one hand gave a smack to the other. Then suddenly both hands heard, "Ouch!" from Mr. Head. The hands realized that they were really part of one body: what one does to another, he really does to himself. It's an analogy for the Jewish people.
It's a good analogy; I had heard it before; what stood out to me in R' Soloff's retelling was that he couldn't bring himself to say that one hand hit the other. Someone had to fill in that detail for him.
My friend told me that she heard from Mrs. Soloff that the two had arranged that R' Soloff would call from the hospital in America any any hour if he had any good news to share.
One night the phone rang.
What could be the good news?
R' Soloff was so happy, he said. The treatments he had been receiving generally clouded his mind but he had finally managed, that day, to learn a daf of Gemara.
This was his great simcha that he had to share.
Someone else I once brought to the Soloffs' said to me, afterward, "They probably never talk in that house about who's going to take out the garbage." They probably don't.
You wouldn't either, if you were standing before the King, would you?
That's where R' Soloff was always standing.
יהי זכרו ברוך
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