The Oil from Ropshitz

Most tzaddikim's yahrzeits passed without special notice from the Shinover Rav, the author of Divrei Yechezkel. He said Tachanun on those days as on any other, and he was not accustomed to travel to their kevarim. For the Ropshitzer alone he made an exception, marking his yahrzeit and going to his tziyun, because he believed he owed the Ropshitzer his life.

It is told that at the age of seven, Rav Yechezkel Shraga came within a breath of death. His uncle, Rav Avigdor of Dukla, had come to Rudnick to see his brother, Rav Chaim of Sanz. Just as Rav Avigdor was getting into his carriage to depart, he recalled an item left indoors and asked the boy to bring it. Eager to please, the child bolted across the road, straight into the path of a speeding wagon piled high with lumber. The wheels passed over him. The doctors who examined him lost hope, and the surgeon found that his liver had been severed in two.

Rav Avigdor lifted his hands toward Heaven and pledged that if a son was meant to be born to him, he would give that son up for this boy's life. From then on he had only daughters. The Divrei Chaim, the boy's father, then laid his hands on the shattered body, and wherever he touched, the bones joined and straightened. Even in advanced age, people, doctors above all, marveled at how upright and dignified the Shinover Rav stood.

Yet the Divrei Chaim was still afraid, because the child's inner organs were injured past any natural healing. He dispatched one of his chassidim to his own rebbe, Rav Naftoli of Ropshitz, to ask for tefillos on the boy's behalf. The Ropshitzer did more than pray. He returned a flask of pure olive oil with the instruction to rub it over the child's body. Before long the boy had recovered.

As an old man, the Shinover Rav often described his rescue. He remembered feeling, while the oil was rubbed in, how his bones were mending and his organs were setting themselves right until he was whole again. Then he would sigh and say wistfully, “Where could we find such pure, holy oil today, if we needed it?”