The Fifth of Tammuz
Leafing through his manuscripts, Rav Heller found a tradition about the fifth of Tammuz that explained his own arrest.
A story ofRav Gershon Shaul Yomtov Lipman Hellerהרב גרשון שאול יום טוב ליפמן בן נתן הלרProfile ›
It is told that Rav Heller wrote to his children from the other side of his ordeal, saying that while going through his manuscripts he came upon a note he had once made. In Prague he had heard Rav Pinchas of Krakow, a head of the Council of Four Lands, relate a tradition about an earlier age. The government had decreed that on the fifth of Tammuz every holy sefer should be burned, and the sages of that generation turned to a dream inquiry to learn why. The reply was a phrase, Zos Chukas HaTorah, read through the Aramaic translation of that week's pasuk: Da Gezeiras Oraisa. The word da, they saw, has the numerical value of five.
Rav Heller recognized his own life in the words. His seforim had been condemned, and he had been taken from Prague on that very day. He was seized in Vienna on the seventeenth of Tammuz and set free on the twenty-eighth of Av, forty days in all, like the forty years of wandering in the desert. A decree about the Torah's chukim had come to him, he wrote, because of the Torah.
That is why he asked every descendant, sons and daughters and their spouses, until Mashiach comes, to fast on the fifth of Tammuz until after Maariv.
Source: Megillas Eivah, Part 1 (HebrewBooks.org/9529); in English in The Feast and the Fast (tr. C. U. Lipschitz and N. Rosenstein, Moznaim, 1984)
Most of us have a date on the calendar that we would rather forget. This week, take five quiet minutes with a notebook and ask what that day, or a recent setback, has taught you. Write down one honest sentence about what you learned, and one small thing you will do differently because of it. Rav Heller did not stop at suffering. He found meaning in it, and passed that meaning on. You can do the same, in a gentle way, for yourself and for the people who come after you.