The Bricks from the Family Furnace

The Ridbaz used to tell how his father taught him to love Torah. In Kobrin, parents hired a private teacher for their sons and paid him from money that would otherwise have bought food. A time came when the Ridbaz's father could not pay for several months. The teacher, who dearly loved the gifted boy, said nothing to him and sent no reminder to his father. But the boy himself felt uncomfortable about learning when his teacher went unpaid.

That winter was bitterly cold, and the oven in the beis medrash where the children learned had broken. It needed fireproof bricks, which could not be found in the middle of winter, and the children sat there in their coats, shivering. His father heard about it and went home. He gathered the family and told his wife that they wanted their son to learn Torah, and that although they could not pay the teacher, the cold was a small thing if their Yankel could keep learning. He proposed to give the beis medrash the bricks from their own oven.

His wife answered with tears of joy, "Of course." The father took apart their own oven and brought the bricks to the beis medrash, and no one knew where they had come from. The Ridbaz said that during the cold nights, as his family trembled, he learned to value Torah above everything in the world. He would say, "This lesson stayed with me my whole life: Torah is more precious than anything else, and it is worth suffering for."