Righteousness Goes Before Him

The Rebbe's grandson, Rav Avrohom Yehoshua Heschel, once recounted an episode in Hamodia's Inyan Magazine. One early morning the Rebbe and the Potiker Rav were returning from the mikveh, walking along Henry Street, down on the Lower East Side. Suddenly the Rebbe stopped and pointed across the street. A woman sat on a stoop surrounded by shopping bags and other belongings, and the Rebbe asked what was happening there.

They crossed over, and the Rebbe asked the woman why she was sitting outdoors at such an early hour. She explained that her landlord had put her out because she had not paid the rent. When the Rebbe asked where he lived, she said that he lived on the first floor of the same building, so the two of them knocked on his door.

The landlord was astonished to see the Kopycznitzer Rebbe and the Potiker Rav at his door at that hour. He explained that he was running a business, and that the woman had not paid for six months. The Rebbe asked how much she owed. Sixty dollars, said the landlord, for the six months. The Rebbe took the money from his pocket and paid him. Then he went to his Bais Medrash and returned with another sixty dollars, saying that he was paying six months in advance, and asked whether she could now move back in. The landlord agreed readily. "Now let us go daven," said the Rebbe.

The Potiker Rav would say, when he told this story, that he now understood the pasuk "Tzedek lefanav yehalech" (Righteousness goes before him). The Rebbe was so careful with shmiras einayim that he had not even seen the woman from where he stood. His heart told him that someone was sitting outside at six in the morning. Chessed was so much a part of him that his heart saw her across the street.